Jun 13
By Ethan Siegel When isolated stars like our Sun reach the end of their lives, they’re expected to blow off their outer layers in a roughly spherical configuration: a planetary nebula. But the most spectacular bubbles don’t come from gas-and-plasma getting expelled into otherwise empty space, but from young, hot stars whose radiation pushes against …
May 17
By Ethan Siegel Images credit: an artist’s concept of the JPSS-2 Satellite for NOAA and NASA by Orbital ATK (top); complete temperature map of the world from NOAA’s National Weather Service (bottom). If you want to collect data with a variety of instruments over an entire planet as quickly as possible, there are …
Apr 15
Images credit: (top); NASA, ESA, P. Oesch (Yale University), G. Brammer (STScI), P. van Dokkum (Yale University), and G. Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz) (bottom), of the galaxy GN-z11, the most distant and highest-redshifted galaxy ever discovered and spectroscopically confirmed thus far. The farther away you look in the distant universe, the harder …
