Artist’s conception of a brown dwarf — an object intermediate in mass between a star and a planet — along with illustration of its magnetic field.
Double Sunset on a ‘Tatooine’ Exoplanet
Artist impression of a double sunset on a ‘Tatooine’ exoplanet forming in a circumbinary disk that is misaligned with the orbits of its binary stars.
Artist impression of distant, dusty galaxy
Artist impression of what the distant, dusty galaxy called MAMBO-9 would look like in visible light. The galaxy has yet to build most of its stars.
Artist impression of the merging galaxy NGC 6240
Artist impression of the merging galaxy NGC 6240.
A Unified AGN Model
Artist’s conception of the Unified AGN Model. The unified model includes the central black hole, a rotating disk of infalling material surrounding the black hole, and the jets speeding outward from the poles of the disk. In addition, to explain why the same type of object looks different when viewed from different angles, a thick, dusty, doughnut-shaped “torus” is included, surrounding the inner parts. The torus obscures some features when viewed from the side, leading to apparent differences to the observer, even for intrinsically similar objects. Astronomers generically call this common set of features an active galactic nucleus (AGN).
A Star, Sprinkled with Salt
Artist impression of Orion Source I, a young, massive star about 1,500 light-years away. New ALMA observations detected a ring of salt — sodium chloride, ordinary table salt — surrounding the star. This is the first detection of salts of any kind associated with a young star. The blue region (about 1/3 the way out from the center of the disk) represents the region where ALMA detected the millimeter-wavelength “glow” from the salts.