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NASA's ARIA team produced this map of earthquake damage in Southern California from the recent temblors in July2019. The color variation from yellow to red indicates increasingly more significant surface change, or damage.

Experimental mini-accelerator achieves record energy

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have observed an unexpected thin disc of material encircling a supermassive black hole at the heart of the spiral galaxy NGC 3147, located 130 million light-years away.

On Dec. 5, 2017, the Multi Spectral Imager on the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite captured the data for a false-color image of the Thomas Fire in Ventura County, California. Active fires appear orange and the burn scars are brown. Unburned vegetation is green; developed areas are gray.

A Hubble Space Telescope image of the spiral galaxy NGC 3147 appears next to an artist's illustration of the supermassive black hole residing at the galaxy’s core. The Hubble image shows off the galaxy's sweeping spiral arms, full of young blue stars, pinkish nebulas, and dust in silhouette. However, at the brilliant core of NGC 3147 lurks a monster black hole, weighing about 250 million times the mass of our Sun. Hubble observations of the black hole demonstrate two of Einstein’s theories of relativity. The reddish-yellow features swirling around the center are the glow of light from gas trapped by the hefty black hole’s powerful gravity. The black hole is embedded deep within its gravitational field, shown by the green grid that illustrates warped space. The gravitational field is so strong that light is struggling to climb out, a principal described in Einstein's theory of general relativity. Material also is whipping so fast around the black hole that it brightens as it approaches Earth on one side of the disk and gets fainter as it moves away. This effect, called relativistic beaming, was predicted by Einstein's theory of special relativity. NGC 3147 is located 130 million light-years away in the northern circumpolar constellation Draco the Dragon.

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Simulation of the dark matter structure surrounding the Milky Way. Driven by gravity, dark matter forms dense structures, referred to as halos (bright areas), in which galaxies are born. The number and distribution of halos, and therefore also of galaxies, depends on the properties of dark matter, such as its mass and its likelihood to interact with normal matter.

A new sensor developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory combines laser beams with a position sensitive detector to directly measure drift between building stories, an essential part of assessing earthquake damages in a building and deeming them safe to reoccupy.

The climbing robot LEMUR rests after scaling a cliff in Death Valley, California. The robot uses special gripping technology that has helped lead to a series of new, off-roading robots that can explore other worlds.

Bioprinted skin sample