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Keeping Watch

Objects in the night

The CUPID-Mo detector is installed in the Edelweiss cryostat at Modane Underground Laboratory (LSM) in France.

This artist's concept shows a brown dwarf, a ball of gas not massive enough to power itself the way stars do. Despite their name, brown dwarfs would appear magenta or orange-red to the human eye if seen close up.

NASA's AIRS instrument captured this image of Tropical Storm Fay around 2 p.m. local time on July 10, 2020, as the storm swept through New England.

A-68A in open waters.

An unprocessed image from the WISPR instrument on board NASA’s Parker Solar Probe shows comet NEOWISE on July 5, 2020, shortly after its closest approach to the Sun. The Sun is out of frame to the left. The faint grid pattern near the center of the image is an artifact of the way the image is created. The small black structure near the lower left of the image is caused by a grain of dust resting on the imager’s lens.

On August 11, 2019, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured these images of several fires burning in the states of Rondônia, Amazonas, Pará, and Mato Grosso. This year’s drought combined with the recent uptick in deforestation make these states particularly vulnerable this fire season to fires that can grow out of control and spread.

Right: Animation of a Van Hove singularity (VHS) shown approximately 1 nanometer below the surface of an oxide heterostructure made of atomically thin layers of strontium titanate and samarium titanate. Left: Atomic composition of the oxide heterostructure illustrated by colored dots: Purple represents samarium; orange represents strontium; light blue represents titanium; and small red dots represent oxygen.

An artist's concept of active volcanos on Venus, depicting a subduction zone where the foreground crust plunges into the planet's interior at the topographic trench.