Stars are born, live, and die within the spiral arms of galaxies like the Milky Way. These 19 JWST spirals deliver unprecedented riches.
Search Results
You searched for: light
Black holes aren’t just the densest masses in the Universe, but they also spin the fastest of all massive objects. Here’s why it must be so.
This first-of-its-kind image offers a detailed look at the magnetic fields within the Central Molecular Zone.
The farther away they get, the smaller distant galaxies look. But only up to a point, and beyond that, they appear larger again. Here’s how.
With almost every shovel of sand shifted in Egypt, another artifact comes to light.
Finding life beyond our Solar System requires understanding its host planet.
It may seem as though top performers are always on, but the secret to their success is taking the time to recharge.
We know of stellar mass and supermassive black holes, but intermediate mass ones have long proved elusive. Until now.
While Saturn and its moons all appear faint and cloudy to JWST, Saturn’s rings are the star of the show. Here’s the big scientific reason.
From when its light was emitted, the El Gordo galaxy cluster might be the most massive object in all of existence. Here’s how JWST sees it.
From before the Big Bang to Voyager 1, particle physicist Harry Cliff takes us on a whiz-bang tour of the Universe’s evolution.
The brightest gamma-ray burst ever observed, GRB 221009A behaved in unexpected ways that might help us understand how they occur.
Named “Supernova H0pe,” it shows how JWST plus gravitational lensing can be used to solve the greatest puzzle facing astronomy today.
Human beings are tiny creatures compared to the 92 billion light-year wide observable Universe. How can we comprehend such large scales?
“Imagination is more important than knowledge” is often taken to mean that your conceptions outweigh what’s real. That’s not what he said.
The Universe’s history, from cosmic inflation to the Big Bang to the present, is known. But whether it’s infinite or not is still a mystery.
Many contrarians dispute that cosmic inflation occurred. The evidence says otherwise.
“If we find just one other example of biology out there, then life is not an accident.”
IceCube just found an active galaxy in the nearby Universe, 47 million light-years away, through its neutrino emissions: a cosmic first.
With a finite 13.8 billion years having passed since the Big Bang, there’s an edge to what we can see: the cosmic horizon. What’s it like?
Planets can be Earth-like or Neptune-like, but only rarely are in between. This hot, Saturn-like planet hints at a solution to this puzzle.
If you’re a massless particle, you must always move at light speed. If you have mass, you must go slower. So why aren’t any neutrinos slow?
When one path is blocked, a new one must be paved. How Einstein, Heisenberg and Gödel used constraints to make life-changing discoveries:
▸
5 min
—
with
As Uranus approaches its solstice, its polar caps, rings, and moons come into their best focus ever under JWST’s watchful eye. See it now!
Photons come in every wavelength you can imagine. But one particular quantum transition makes light at precisely 21 cm, and it’s magical.
In 1987, the closest supernova directly observed in nearly 400 years occurred. Will a pulsar arise from those ashes? JWST offers clues.
Dark matter’s hallmark is that it gravitates, but shows no sign of interacting under any other force. Does that mean we’ll never detect it?
Scientists will be able to make detailed “Claymation-like” movies of chemical reactions.
The passage of time is something we all experience, as it takes us from one moment to the next. But could it all just be an illusion?
Back in the 1930s, Fritz Zwicky postulated the existence of dark matter. No one took it seriously until Vera Rubin’s work: 40 years later.