GALAXY PORTRAIT. An array of radio telescopes allowed the closest look yet at the Milky Way’s center, which may appear as it does in this illustration. Yellow and red depict radio emissions from Sagittarius A*, which appears to be located off-center from the black hole that is thought to reside at the galaxy’s center. Full Story
Credit: S. Doeleman, M. Weiss/CXC, S. Noble, C. Gammie, NASA

NASA, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, marked its 50th anniversary July 29. Pictured is Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon after the Apollo 11 landing in 1969. Click here for a story looking back at the early history of NASA and space exploration.
Credit: NASA

Today, NASA, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, marks its 50th anniversary. Pictured is the famous "Earthrise" image taken as Apollo 8 orbited the moon in 1968. Click here for a story looking back at the early history of NASA and space exploration.
Credit: NASA

These Hubble Space Telescope images show Jupiter’s "Red Spot Jr.," which was first observed in 2006, and "baby red spot." Red Spot Jr. skipped past the planet's Great Red Spot unscathed. But baby red spot, first observed earlier this year, was unable to fend off the biggest spot's anticyclonic spin. By July 8, the baby spot (arrow) sat to the east or right of the Great Red Spot and appeared deformed and pale. Click here to view an animated version.
Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Simon-Miller (Goddard Space Flight Center), N. Chanover (New Mexico State Univ.), and G. Orton (JPL)

This delicate ribbon of hydrogen gas floats eerily in the Milky Way and is part of a remnant of a supernova. NASA released the image July 1. It is a composite of two photos taken in 2006 and 2008 by instruments on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. For more, visit Hubble's site
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Like two dancers grabbing hands as they pass, the galaxy NGC 5427 at lower left and its southern twin NGC 5426 at upper right, are beginning a temperate, gravitational tango. In about 100 million years, the two will merge into one large, elliptical galaxy. Astronomers at the Gemini South telescope in Chile recently imaged the galaxy twins, which are 90 million light-years away and sit in the Virgo constellation. The image is perhaps a preview for the Milky Way. In about 3 or 4 billion years, it will merge with its sister spiral, the Andromeda Galaxy, which is currently about 2.6 million light-...
Credit: Gemini Observatory

In a gas that’s cold enough, the wavelets of matter we call atoms become long and shallow, lose their individuality and blend into one. At least, that’s what happens in a state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate. This computer simulation shows a pancake-shaped BEC cloud kept inside an electromagnetic trap and initially (upper left) divided into three parts. Removing the partitions unleashes three matter waves, which collide and interfere with one another (upper right). A honeycomb array of vortices appears for a few milliseconds (bottom left) before the orderly pattern breaks up i...
Credit: Gary Ruben/Monash Univ.

In this simulation of a Bose-Einstein condensate, each vortex rotates in the opposite direction (shown by arrows) as its neighbors, just like a cogwheel rotates clockwise if it’s interlocked with one that’s rotating counterclockwise. Initially observed in experiments, such vortices have been theorized to form from random quantum fluctuations. The new simulation suggests that vortices can form without such fluctuations; instead, they may arise from the interactions of the matter waves, Gary Ruben and his colleagues at Monash University in Australia write in an upcoming Physical Review A. -...
Credit: Gary Ruben’s Lab, Monash University

On June 3, the ninth day since NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander arrived at the Red Planet, the craft’s optical microscope took this composite image, the highest resolution picture of dust and sand ever acquired on Mars. The dust, kicked up by the landing, sits on circular pieces of silicone that are 3 millimeters in diameter. The silicone provides a sticky surface for holding the sand-grain-sized particles examined by the microscope.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Like early explorers mapping the continents of our globe, astronomers are busy charting the spiral structure of our galaxy. Using infrared images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists have discovered that the Milky Way's elegant spiral structure is dominated by just two arms. Previously, our galaxy was thought to possess four major arms. This artist's concept illustrates the new view of the Milky Way presented in St. Louis at the 212th American Astronomical Society meeting.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

TOPOLOGICAL HARMONY Familiar relationships between sets of musical notes, such as transposition between chords, directly translate into geometrical structures such as this Möbius strip — where each dot represents a class of equivalent two-note chords — or into more complex structures. MORE
Credit: Science

Astronomers have used the radio-emitting water molecules (illustrated here), or masers, at the heart of the galaxy NGC 4258 to find a more accurate value of the Hubble constant and shed new light on dark energy. Full story
Credit: Courtesy NRAO/AUI, Artist: John Kagaya

Artist's depiction of Mars Phoenix Lander on the planet's icy northern polar region
Credit: JPL/NASA, UA

Flocks of starlings flying over Rome. Physicists used computers to track the motion of single birds in flocks of up to 4,000 starlings. Read the full story.
Credit: STARFLAG Project/INFM-CNR

With computer tracking, physicists found that each starling in a flock adjusts its trajectory to those of its six or seven neighbors, no matter how close or far they are. The technique helps the flocks stay cohesive when attacked by a predator such as a peregrine falcon — although in that case a flock will often still break up into two. Read the full story.
Credit: STARFLAG Project/INFM-CNR