Intelligent aliens, if they exist in the galaxy or the Universe, might be detectable from a variety of signals: electromagnetic, from planet modification, or because they’re spacefaring. But we haven’t found any evidence for an inhabited alien planet so far....
From macroscopic scales down to subatomic ones, the sizes of the fundamental particles play only a small role in determining the sizes of composite structures. Whether the building blocks are truly fundamental and/or point-like particles is still not known, but...
This map shows the global temperatures in each region of Earth for the year 2024, relative to the average recorded temperature of that region from 1951–1980. Regions where the 2024 temperature was greater than that average are shown in red,...
A mathematical simulation of the warped space-time near two merging neutron stars that result in the creation of a black hole. The colored bands are gravitational-wave peaks and troughs, with the colors getting brighter as the wave amplitude increases. The...
This composite JWST image of the object Herbig-Haro 30 in the Taurus Molecular Cloud shows many features common to young, massive stars: a dusty disk (seen edge-on here), reflective dust grains above and below the disk, bipolar jets running perpendicular...
The Egg Nebula, as imaged here by Hubble, is a preplanetary nebula, as its outer layers have not yet been heated to sufficient temperatures by the central, contracting star to become fully ionized. Many of the giant stars visible today...
Starting in the 1990s, North Korea began to deforest much of their land to serve agricultural purposes. However, just a few years later, flooding issues, largely related to that very act of deforestation, led to food shortages and famines. More...
When an exoplanet passes in front of its parent star, a portion of that starlight will filter through the exoplanet’s atmosphere, allowing us to break up that light into its constituent wavelengths and to characterize the atomic and molecular composition...
This image shows a portion of the lunar surface, as imaged by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Prominent in this image is the large crater at right, and two long, straight valleys that point away from it. These latter two features...
This MIRI image from JWST data shows the central portion of the star-forming region N79, which is now known to house a super star cluster known as H72.97–69.39: just the fourth super star cluster ever found within our Local Group....
