Astronomy Staff, Author at Astronomy.com | Page 7 of 276

An end-on view of one of the first full-energy collisions between gold ions at Brookhaven Lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), as captured by the Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC (STAR) detector. The collisions create a quark-gluon soup that reproduces the state of the universe less than 10 microseconds after the Big Bang. The tracks indicate paths taken by thousands of subatomic particles produced in the collisions as they pass through STAR's 3-D digitial camera. Credit: BNL.

Cosmology, Science

The science behind the Big Bang theory

open and globular star clusters

Galaxies, Stars

Why are open clusters and globular clusters found in different places?

What happens at the center of a black hole?

Illustration of how a radio telescope works

How do radio telescopes work?

Billions of years from now, the night sky will glow with stars, dust, and gas from two galaxies: the Milky Way, in which we live, and the encroaching Andromeda Galaxy (M31). Credit: Lynette Cook for Astronomy magazine.

Galaxies, Science

The Andromeda and Milky Way collision, explained

An image of the area surrounding Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, in X-ray and infrared light. X-ray: NASA/UMass/D.Wang et al.; IR: NASA/STScI

Exotic Objects, Science

4 of the weirdest objects in space

Mercury, shown in an enhanced-color image from NASA’s Messenger probe. Credit: NASA / JHU Applied Physics Lab / Carnegie Inst. Washington

Astronomy for beginners, Observing, Observing Basics, Planets

How to observe planets with a small telescope

The Andromeda Galaxy is the nearest large galaxy to us. Credit: Massimo Di Fusco

Astronomy for beginners, Science

20 strange but true space facts

The curvature of the Earth is visible in this 2014 photo, which ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti snapped from the International Space Station. Source: NASA/Samantha Cristoforetti

Astronomy for beginners, Science

Why Earth is not flat: The conspiracy debunked

Neil Armstrong was the first man on the Moon — but only a few pictures from the crew’s cameras show him on his historic moonwalk. In one of them (above), he is visible as a reflection in Buzz Aldrin’s helmet. Credit: NASA

Astronomy for beginners, Space Exploration

5 facts about NASA you might not know

A composite of two different times, as seen by Curiosity on Mars

Robotic Spaceflight, Solar System

What time is it on Mars?

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a snapshot of the early universe; it is the oldest light we can see. This light has been Doppler shifted into the microwave portion of the spectrum, outside the realm of naked-eye observing. In this image, generated with data from the Planck satellite, different colors represent tiny temperature fluctuations in the universe. Credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration

Astronomy for beginners, Science

4 things you might not know about space