Recorded during 2024, this year-spanning series of images reveals a pattern in the seasonal drift of the Sun's daily motion through planet Earth's sky. Known to some as an analemma, the figure-eight curve was captured in exposures taken only at 1pm local time... Continue Reading →
What are these bubbles frozen into Lake Baikal? Methane. Lake Baikal, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Russia, is the world's largest (by volume), oldest, and deepest lake, containing over 20% of the world's fresh water. The lake is also a vast storehouse of methane,... Continue Reading →
One of the biggest mysteries in science – dark energy – doesn't actually exist, according to researchers looking to solve the riddle of how the Universe is expanding. For the past 100 years, physicists have generally assumed that the cosmos... Continue Reading →
A year in sunsets, from April 2023 to March 2024, track along the western horizon in these stacked panoramic views. The well-planed sequence is constructed of images recorded near the 21st day of the indicated month from the same location overlooking Cairo, Egypt.... Continue Reading →
After the Crab Nebula, this giant star cluster is the second entry in 18th century astronomer Charles Messier's famous list of things that are not comets. M2 is one of the largest globular star clusters now known to roam the... Continue Reading →
What kind of strange galaxy is this? This rare structure is known as a polar ring galaxy, and it seems to have two different rings of stars. In this galaxy, NGC 660, one ring of bright stars, gas, and dark dust appears... Continue Reading →
The first-ever photo of a black hole rocked the world in 2019, when the Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT, published an image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, also known as Virgo A or... Continue Reading →
This kilometer high cliff occurs on the surface of a comet. It was discovered on the dark nucleus of Comet Churyumov - Gerasimenko (CG) by Rosetta, a robotic spacecraft launched by ESA, which orbited the comet from 2014 to 2016. The ragged cliff, as featured here, was imaged... Continue Reading →
New radio astronomy observations of a planetary system in the process of forming show that once the first planets form close to the central star, these planets can help shepherd the material to form new planets farther out. In this... Continue Reading →
Scents of Science 