Corey S. Powell

@coreyspowell.bsky.social

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Fascinated by things very big, very small, and beyond the limits of the human senses. Founder of OpenMind: www.openmindmag.org Creator of the Invisible Universe column: https://invisibleuniverse.substack.com/

This artist’s impression depicts the structure of our galaxy, the Milky Way, based on data from ESA's Gaia and illustrates how scientists have revised the position of its outer arms thanks to observations from ESA's XMM-Newton and NASA's Chandra. The two X-ray telescopes have spotted the aftermath of three bright cosmic explosions echoing through the outer spiral arms of our galaxy. By measuring the distance to these echoes, a research team found that the outer arms are up to 10% further away than we thought.
Two variations of the first color photo from the Viking 1 lander, taken on the Mars surface 21 July 1976. The blue-sky version was released the same day. The true red-sky version was released 26 July. The red cast is probably due to scattering and reflection from sediment suspended int he lower atmosphere. To assist in balancing the colors, a photo was teaken of a test chart mounted on the rear of the spacecraft and the calibration then applied to the entire scene.
On the morning of July 20, 1976, roughly 40 minutes after mission controllers received word that the Viking 1 lander had successfully touched down on the surface of Mars, this photo gave us our first view from the surface of another planet. NASA/JPL
French astronomer Charles Messier
Artistic illustration depicting an ocean between 554 and 539 million years ago. The seabed is covered with worm-like creatures anchored to the ground at one end. There are also disc-shaped animals on the ground and lozenge-shaped swimming creatures. Reconstruction of Jiangchuan biota (~554-539 million years ago). Credit Xiaodong Wang
Mean helium absorption, calculated from 10,833 to 10,834 Å, as a function of time, measured relative to the mid-transit time () of LHS 1140b. Gray points are all observed spectra, and black points have been binned by a factor of three (17 min). The pink shaded regions indicate the data used to construct the stellar template.
This artist conceptualization shows the exoplanet LHS 1140 b in the foreground surrounded by a helium-rich atmosphere. In the distance is its red dwarf star orbited by another rocky planet. Melissa Weiss/Center for Astrophysics
(Top) Condensate atom cloud imaged in the IR with decreasing temperature. (Bottom) Temperature contour plot showing the atom cloud.
Astronaut Jessica Meir inspects optical fibers while installing hardware updates to NASA’s Cold Atom Lab, or CAL, aboard the International Space Station on May 8, 2026. About the size of a minifridge, CAL enables researchers to explore quantum physics. Image: NASA
Bussard ramjet. Or is it a cocktail shaker?
This stunning new mosaic of images from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope showcases the nearby star-forming cluster, NGC 1333, which contains IRAS 2A. The nebula is in the Perseus molecular cloud, and located approximately 960 light-years away. Webb’s superb sensitivity allows astronomers to investigate young objects with extremely low masses. Some of the faintest ‘stars’ in the picture are in fact newly born free-floating brown dwarfs with masses comparable to those of giant planets.
An image of the Milky Way captured by the MeerKAT radio telescope array spans 1,000 light-years. At the center of the MeerKAT image the region surrounding the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole blazes bright. Huge vertical filamentary structures echo those captured on a smaller scale by Webb in Sagittarius C’s blue-green hydrogen cloud. Like a super-long exposure photograph, MeerKAT shows the bubble-like remnants of supernovas that exploded over millennia, capturing the dynamic nature of the Milky Way’s chaotic core.
Left: the field around the gravitationally lensed galaxy nicknamed “Shadow Blaster.” This galaxy lies 11 billion light-years away and sits just behind the bright red galaxy at the center of this image. Center: a close-up of the gravitational lens in which the red foreground galaxy is causing the light from the more distant Shadow Blaster galaxy to bend around it, creating multiple distorted images of the galaxy that appear as yellow arcs. Right: a close-up of the gravitationally lensed Shadow Blaster galaxy.
The discovery of the superkilonova "ZTF 25abjmnps." Upper left: zoomed-in sky map of S250818k, with the 50% and 95% contours marked by gray lines, and the position of ZTF 25abjmnps marked by a white star. The other excluded ZTF candidates are marked by black dots. ZTF 25abjmnps lies within the central 50% region, close to the center. Center: zoomed-out sky map of S250818k. Lower left: line-of-sight distance at the position of ZTF 25abjmnps. The median GW distance (262 Mpc) at the location of ZTF 25abjmnps is illustrated with the vertical dotted black line, and the shaded regions correspond to the ±1σ, ±2σ, and ±3σ regions. The luminosity distance of ZTF 25abjmnps is illustrated with the dashed red line and lies within 2σ of the median value. Right: false-color ZTF discovery image of ZTF 25abjmnps in the g band and r band (top), alongside the template reference image (center) and difference image (bottom). Differencing yields a clean PSF-like excess in both filters at the location of the transient.
Artist interpretation depicts a hypothesized event known as a superkilonova. Initially, a massive star explodes in a supernova, which generates elements like carbon and iron (left). In the aftermath, two neutron stars are born, at least one of which is believed to be less massive than our Sun (middle). The neutron stars spiral together, sending gravitational waves rippling through the cosmos, before merging in a dramatic kilonova (right). Kilonovae seed the universe with the heaviest elements, such as gold at platinum, which glow in red light as depicted in the animation. Credit: Caltech/K. Miller and R. Hurt (IPAC)
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The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) reveals the nearby galaxy Centaurus A, exposing the dusty structures and hidden activity that shape this unusual system. Webb’s infrared vision pierces thick lanes of dust that obscure much of the galaxy in visible light, unveiling intricate filaments, loops, and glowing clouds of warm dust stretching across its centre. At the heart of the galaxy, an actively feeding supermassive black hole shines brightly, surrounded by complex structures sculpted by a past galactic collision and ongoing activity.
This ground-based image of nearby galaxy Centaurus A from the European Southern Observatory (top left) puts the near-infrared and mid-infrared views from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope image into context.
Centaurus A is one of the foremost examples of a radio-loud active galactic nucleus (AGN). On images obtained at optical wavelengths, thick dust layers almost completely obscure the galaxy's centre. This structure was first reported by Sir John Herschel in 1847. Until 1949, NGC 5128 was thought to be a strange object in the Milky Way, but it was then identified as a powerful radio galaxy and designated Centaurus A. The distance is about 10-13 million light-years (3-4 Mpc) and the apparent visual magnitude is about 8, or 5 times too faint to be seen with the unaided eye.There is strong evidence that Centaurus A is a merger of an elliptical with a spiral galaxy, since elliptical galaxies would not have had enough dust and gas to form the young, blue stars seen along the edges of the dust lane. The core of Centaurus A is the smallest known extragalactic radio source, only 10 light-days across. A jet of high-energy particles from this center is observed in radio and X-ray images. The core probably contains a supermassive black hole with a mass of about 100 million solar masses.
Three views of a computer model of 1998 KY26, derived from radar observations in 1998
Comet 311P/PanSTARRS imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope on 10–23 September 2013.
Kamo'oalewa is the smallest asteroid visited by humanity to date, with a maximum dimension of only ~30 meters. The record was previously held by Dimorphos (~170 meters across), the impact target for the DART mission in 2022.
On July 2, 2026, the Tianwen-2 probe took an image of asteroid 2016HO3 at a distance of approximately 20 kilometers. (Image provided by China National Space Administration)
Asteroid Trifune as seen by the Telephoto Optical Navigation Camera (ONC-T) on the Hayabusa2 probe.
An illustration of Katalyst Space’s Link spacecraft (left) approaching NASA’s Swift gamma-ray observatory. Credit: Katalyst Space
Jack Black salute
JWST NIRSpec PRISM transit observations of the white dwarf planet WD 1856 b integrated over two broadband wavelength regions: 0.55–1.71 μm (blue data points) and 4.19–4.96 μm (red data points). The best-fitting model transit light curves are overplotted (blue and red curves). The transit event is shallower at longer wavelengths owing to planetary thermal emission diluting the transit depth. The top schematic depicts the grazing transit geometry of the WD 1856 system, with the planet and white dwarf shown to scale.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope measured the constituents of exoplanet WD 1856 b as it passed in front of its star, finding signs of methane. WD 1856 b orbits a white dwarf star the size of Earth. As a result, the planet blocks more than half of the star’s light. The main image is an illustration of the likely appearance of the system.
Plan for the Deep Synoptic Array, under construction in Nevada
This 1.7-gigapixel image of a field of stars in the constellation Lupus showcases the unprecedented view of the Universe that NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory gives us. Equipped with the LSST Camera — the largest digital camera in the world — Rubin combines a wide view of the sky with the ability to detect extremely faint objects. With this capability, Rubin can reveal details of the cosmos across an enormous range of scales, from distant galaxies, to individual stars, to the wispy clouds of dust spread throughout our galaxy.
The coronal mass ejection (CME) of April 1-2 2026 started fast and low in the corona, blasting its way out through the solar wind to a distance more than halfway to Earth's orbit as viewed by the PUNCH spacecraft (2026-04-02 12:00 UT).
Measurements of specific element varieties by Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument show how different the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is from comets originating in our own Solar System. Researchers used NIRSpec to measure carbon-13, which contains an extra neutron, relative to the more common carbon-12. They also measured the abundance of heavy hydrogen, which is a hydrogen atom with an added neutron. Webb’s NIRSpec found a surprisingly large amount of heavy hydrogen, with a low abundance of carbon-13, indicating that 3I/ATLAS came from a place very different from our own Solar System. Researchers say early analysis of these results indicates that 3I/ATLAS was ejected from its origin system billions of years ago.
Composite image of the region around Sagittarius A* (marked by the white dot). Orange colors show ALMA observations at 230 GHz, which traces cold clouds of carbon monoxide gas. Blue colors show x-ray emission measured by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which traces hot plasma. The lack of cold gas in the highlighted cone—which is 3 light-years across—is evidence of an outflowing wind.
The little red dot that would come to be known as GLIMPSE-17775 was fortunately included in the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s field of view as it was observing galaxy cluster Abell S1063 for a different scientific purpose. GLIMPSE-17775 is located behind the galaxy cluster and has a cosmological redshift of 3.5, meaning it existed about 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang. Since galaxy clusters like Abell S1063 are some of the most massive objects in the Universe, light emitted by objects farther away can become distorted as it reaches the telescope. This effect is known as gravitational lensing. The combination of Webb’s 30 hours of observing time and gravitational lensing enabled scientists to obtain the deepest spectrum to date of a little red dot. The result: the strongest evidence to date of a hot, dense gas cocoon known as a “black hole star.”
Studying Type Ia supernovae – violent, luminous white dwarf star explosions – led to the Nobel Prize-winning discovery that the universe's expansion is accelerating. This image combines data from four space telescopes to create a multi-wavelength view of all that remains of RCW 86, the oldest documented example of a supernova.
David Hockney assembling the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television joiner, 20 July 1985
“Pearblossom Highway, 11-18 April 1986, #2.” By David Hockney.
OSIRIS-APEX This computer illustration of NASA's OSIRIS-APEX, formerly OSIRIS-REx, shows the spacecraft preparing to fire its thrusters to stir up rocks and dust on the surface of asteroid Apophis. This process will allow scientists to analyze the composition of the material under the surface.Image: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab
Skeleton of Pikachu
During Artemis III, the agency’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket will launch the Orion spacecraft and its crew from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to low Earth orbit. After Orion systems checkouts, the spacecraft will, for the first time, demonstrate rendezvous and docking capabilities with test versions from one, or both, American commercial human landing systems in development by Blue Origin and SpaceX. This highly choreographed mission includes a dramatic multi-launch campaign of the world’s most powerful rockets, testing integrated hardware between Orion and the landers, including system interfaces, software, propulsion, and communications. Crew assignments are as follows: NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik, commander ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Luca Parmitano, pilot NASA astronaut Andre Douglas, mission specialist NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, mission specialist
Author of Ducks and How to Make Them Pay
The line of three stars that make Orion so distinctive are known as Orion’s Belt. This comes from the classical figure of Orion as a Hunter, which is a link dating back from well before the Ancient Greek times. He is often depicted with his right arm raised holding a club, and his left arm holding out a shield to defend himself from Taurus, the Bull, which he faces to the west. The bright star to the top left of the quadrilateral of Orion is Betelgeuse, marking his right shoulder, and the one to the lower right is Rigel, marking his left knee. The other two stars of the quadrilateral are Bellatrix, at top right, and Saiph at lower left. Where have you come across Bellatrix before? Probably from Bellatrix Lestrange, in the Harry Potter books. The name comes from the Latin for ‘female warrior’.
This image shows just a small, northern portion of OMC-2, located 1280 light-years from Earth and a little north of the Orion Nebula. Every stage of star formation — from the youngest stellar embryos, to protoplanetary discs, to newly-minted pre-main sequence stars — is contained within just this scene, which stretches 150 light-years across. The intense star-forming activity has produced an impressive display of billowing outflows and sparkling stars atop swirling layers of gas and dark, obscuring clouds. Molecular clouds such as OMC-2 are vast clumps of gas much more dense than the rest of interstellar space. This density allows complex molecules to form, protected from the radiation given off by other stars, and it means that gravity can cause the cloud to collapse and form stars. The earliest stage of this process is a protostar - a growing star that is being fed gas from the surrounding cloud through a spinning disc of gas. As gas falls onto the protostar, it heats up, powering the glow of the protostar. The immense amount of energy acquired during this process is unleashed in fierce jets of gas from the poles of the star, frequently seen as twin glowing outflows that mark the location of a protostar.
This image, taken with the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) shows a disc of material around the young star AB Aurigae, where planets might be forming. Similar observations taken over the course of four years show the disc rotating around the star. The image to the right has been processed to highlight certain features of the disc, such as spiral arms and radial shadows cast by dense clumps of material. The shadows are indicated here with arrows.
AB Aurigae is located in the Auriga constellation, 520 light-years away from Earth. While the overall rotation of the material within the disc is governed by the star’s gravity, there are features like “twists” signalling the places where planets could be forming. As the new planets interact with surrounding material and feed with gas and dust, they create disturbances that cause this phenomenon as the planet rotates around the star. These features are better seen in the right side of the video, which has been processed to enhance these structures. The images were taken with the SPHERE instrument at the VLT, which blocks the glare of the central star, revealing the disc around it in great detail. In particular, the images show radial shadows caused by opaque clumps from denser parts of the disc that can be seen orbiting this star. These SPHERE observations will be key to understanding the precise way in which planets form around this star.
The SPICE-RACS (Spectra and Polarisation In Cutouts of Extragalactic sources from RACS) map of magnetic fields. The plane of the Milky Way runs through the centre of the image, from left to right. The hole in the top left is the part of the sky not visible to the telescope.
The Loktak Protocluster Region. A false-color composite image combining visible-light observations from the Hubble Space Telescope with infrared observations from JWST. White dots mark galaxies identified by the Subaru Telescope, while orange shading indicates regions where galaxies are densely concentrated. Colored contours show galaxy number density relative to the cosmic average at that time: 2 times (pink), 5 times (green), 8 times (blue), and 10 times (black). The white dashed line outlines the full extent of the Loktak Protocluster. The close-up images in the red and blue boxes show examples of galaxies in dense environments and in typical environments, respectively.
This artist’s illustration shows the magnetic activity around a hot Jupiter exoplanet. Hot Jupiters have one side that is always facing their host star and is scorching hot, whereas the other side is extremely cold. This steep temperature difference creates fast winds that blow from the day side to the night side. The planet’s magnetic field, shown here with blue lines, can slow these winds down. Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Garlick
The I didn't do it hot dog guy
Calvin visits the future so he won't have to do his homework. It does not go well.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket exploded on the pad at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station as the result of an anomaly during a static fire test on Thursday, May 28. The test was in preparation for a planned launch as soon as June 4.
This is an image from NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera) on Webb that shows Abell2744-QSO1, magnified and triply imaged by galaxy cluster Abell 2744. Abell2744-QSO1 (QSO1) is a prototypical Little Red Dot, one of the first of hundreds of tiny glowing flecks of infrared light that Webb has found speckling the early Universe. QSO1 is roughly 1,300 light-years across and with a cosmological redshift (z) of 7, its light dates back to just 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was only 5% of its current age. QSO1 is ideal for study because it is gravitationally lensed, both magnified and triply imaged by Abell 2744, the intervening mega-cluster of galaxies that warps its surrounding space-time. Detailed study of the brightest of the three lensed images, QSO1A (upper right), shows that the object consists of a central supermassive black hole 50 million times the mass of the Sun, surrounded by a cloud of hydrogen and helium gas with very small amounts of heavier elements like oxygen. Unlike supermassive black holes in nearby galaxies, which make up only a tiny fraction of their host galaxy’s total mass, QSO1’s black hole contains twice as much mass as the galactic material surrounding it.
An image detail from Webb’s NIRCam shows the Little Red Dot Abell2744-QSO1, gravitationally lensed by Abell 2744, an enormous mega-cluster of galaxies also known as Pandora’s Cluster. Pulled out to the right is a map showing the speed that gas is moving toward or away from the telescope (rotational velocity) in different parts of QSO1. The map was made with data collected using NIRSpec’s integral field unit (IFU), a combination of camera and spectrograph. The IFU gathers an image along with 900 spectra from a square patch of sky 3 arcseconds by 3 arcseconds, creating maps showing differences in brightness of thousands of wavelengths between 0.6-micron and 5.3-micron light across the object. The gas velocity is calculated based on Doppler shift: the colours are shifted slightly toward shorter (bluer) wavelengths where material is moving toward us, and longer (redder) wavelengths where it is moving away. The Webb data shows that the glowing gas has Keplerian rotation: it is orbiting a central point in the same way that planets orbit a star. This means that most of the mass of QSO1 must reside in a single point in the centre, i.e., a black hole. Because the velocity of the orbiting gas follows very simple laws of gravity, the data can then be used to calculate the mass of the black hole: It appears to be 50 million solar masses, or 50 million times the mass of our Sun. This is about two-thirds of the entire mass of QSO1.
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New masses in the stellar graveyard plot, showing astronomical observations of black holes and neutron stars. The number of gravitational-wave observations of black holes is overwhelming. The plot is arranged to look nice, the horizontal axis has no meaning, but the vertical one shows masses. We have a significant range of masses from about 1 solar mass to over 200 solar masses for our largest merger remnant. New out today is a neutron star black hole binary GW230518_125908, as well as a lot of binary black holes.
Earth’s core as modeled in the numerical geodynamo simulation as part of research into geomagnetic jerks and rapid hydromagnetic waves published as the cover story in Nature Geosciences, May 2018. The magnetic field lines (orange) are stretched, twisted and folded by the turbulent convection producing shear of electrically conducting fluid (red and blue). Hydromagnetic waves are triggered when the shear is misaligned with field lines, and propagate along these lines to the surface of the core where they can focus and cause geomagnetic jerks.
The molten core, which swirls about 2200 km beneath our feet, generates Earth’s geomagnetic field as it moves. By measuring small changes in the magnetic field, scientists have historically observed the core flowing mainly westwards. But in 2010, it unexpectedly changed direction deep beneath the Pacific Ocean and started moving strongly eastwards. The reasons for this unexplained reversal in the flow of molten material are still a mystery. But satellites, including ESA’s Swarm and CryoSat, provided data that has now been analyzed and published.
Lippershey's patent application for the telescope.
This sketch, found in a letter from Giovanni Battista della Porta (c.1535-1615) dated August 28, 1609 to Federico Cesi (1585-1630), is the first known representation of the telescope: 'It is a tube made of silver-plated tin, with length of a palm ad, three fingers in diameter, which has a convex eyepiece at end a: there is another canal [c] in the same tube, 4 fingers long, which enters into the first, and has a concave [lens] at the top'.