Science | WPN World People News

Messenger’s iridescent Mercury.

A Puzzling Geometry Conundrum

Artist’s illustration of a tidal disruption event, in which a black hole tears apart a passing star and lights up as it accretes the stellar material.

WFIRST will make its microlensing observations in the direction of the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The higher density of stars will yield more exoplanet detections.

Climate variability could create a gap between total energy generation and demand – a situation that could lead to blackouts.

Intermediate-mass black hole with torn-apart star (artist's impression).

Figure 1: An artist’s impression shows how an imaginary Neon footballfish (having Neon-Sign) eats away at the electrons inside a star core.

When you pick out a new shirt in the store, you must first find your size: small, medium, or large. Did you know that the dark monsters of the Universe, black holes, also come in different sizes?

This illustration shows the concept of gravitational microlensing. When one star in the sky passes nearly in front of another, it can lens light from the background source star. If the nearer star hosts a planetary system, the planets can also act as lenses, each producing a short deviation in the brightness of the source.

This optical/infrared/X-ray composite image of M82 reveals how outflows from a galaxy can enrich the circumgalactic medium that surrounds it. What can we learn about our universe’s evolution from this metal-enriched material?