This illustration shows Barnard’s star, with the correct size and temperature/color, as orbited by the four recently confirmed exoplanets around it. All four exoplanets are close in, with orbits ranging from 2.3 to 6.7 days, and small in mass: between...
Ernst Stuhlinger, seated at far left, was one of the early pioneers of NASA and of spaceflight missions in general in the United States. His idea for a Sun ship, powered by an ion drive that he codeveloped, is illustrated...
A tremendous revolution has occurred in the past four decades concerning our ultimate cosmic origins. While the Big Bang still plays an important role in the cosmic story, it is no longer considered to be the ultimate beginning or the...
This illustration shows how binary stars interact with a supermassive black hole to create a population of hypervelocity stars that wind up getting gravitationally kicked so strongly, they get ejected from their home galaxy. This process should be at play...
We normally conceive of our Universe as having emerged from a preceding period of cosmic inflation, with our Big Bang occurring where one region of inflating space ceased inflating and transitioned to being dominated by matter and radiation. However, in...
When the proper conditions are achieved, even multiple fermions, which normally cannot occupy the same quantum state, can reach a state known as a Fermionic condensate, where they all achieve the lowest-energy configuration possible. This is the seventh state of...
Although the Spitzer space telescope’s infrared views could reveal many features, such as the warped disk, within the Sombrero galaxy, the superior size, resolution, and wavelength capabilities of JWST show a large set of features that Spitzer simply couldn’t resolve....
This illustration shows a coronavirus molecule with a string of RNA inside. Although a SARS-CoV-2 virus might have a genome that’s only 30,000 base pairs long, about 1000 of those base pairs are different from its closest naturally-found relatives. Meanwhile,...
This image shows a laser guide star being created towards the galactic center of the Milky Way. While the Milky Way’s plane shines prominently overhead in this photo, optical observatories find very few spiral and elliptical galaxies close to the...
This moving, zipping star field appears to depict an ultra-relativistic motion through space, extremely close to the speed of light. Under the laws of relativity, you neither reach nor exceed the speed of light if you’re made of matter. You...
