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Arctic sea ice was photographed in 2011 during NASA's ICESCAPE mission, or "Impacts of Climate on Ecosystems and Chemistry of the Arctic Pacific Environment," a shipborne investigation to study how changing conditions in the Arctic affect the ocean's chemistry and ecosystems. The bulk of the research took place in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas in summer 2010 and 2011.

Image 1: The way in which galaxies cluster together in the Universe is made clear in this image of the Universe as observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The yellow dots represent the position of individual galaxies, while the orange loop shows the area of the Universe spanning 1 billion light-years. At the center is Earth, and around it is a three-dimensional map of where different galaxies are. The image reveals how galaxies are not uniformly spread out throughout the Universe, and how they cluster together to create areas called filaments, or are completely absent in areas called voids.

Wetlands

Kazan Federal University researchers put forth their ideas in Physical Review D.

Artist impression of a massive, dusty galaxy. This is similar to what XMM-2599 looked like in visible light when it was forming its stars.

Uranus (left) and Neptune photographed by Voyager 2.

Artist's illustration of a Neptune-like planet. A new study explores why Neptunes are so rare when their smaller cousins, sub-Neptunes, are very common.

Graphic illustrating radio signals from a remote station (bent purple line) interfering with a local station (black tower) after being reflected off a plasma layer in the ionosphere.

Fig 1: Inflation stretched the initial microscopic Universe to a macroscopic size and turned the cosmic energy into matter. However, it likely created an equal amount of matter and anti-matter predicting complete annihilation of our universe. The authors discuss the possibility that a phase transition after inflation led to a tiny imbalance between the amount of matter and anti-matter, so that some matter could survive a near-complete annihilation. Such a phase transition is likely to lead to a network of "rubber-band"-like objects called cosmic strings, that would produce ripples of space-time known as gravitational waves. These propagating waves can get through the hot and dense Universe and reach us today, 13.8 billion years after the phase transition. Such gravitational waves can most likely be discovered by current and future experiments.

An artist’s impression of K2-18b orbiting K2-18 along with another planet in the system.