John Williams
A Primer on Cosmic Sprinklers
The planetary nebula Fleming 1, as seen with ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Credit: ESO/H. Boffin The neat thing about planetary…
Swirling Vortex and Mini Moons: Spectacular Views of the Little Things Around Saturn
High-altitude clouds in Titan's seasonal south polar swirl glow dimly in this image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. With wild storms…
Stirred, Not Shaken. Black Hole Antics Puff Up Whopper of a Galaxy
Its massive gravitational field warping space, the huge elliptical galaxy A2261-BCG, seems to have a diffuse halo of stars instead…
Surprise! Galaxies Still Evolving in Present Universe
A giant spiral of gas dust and stars, Messier 101 spans 170,000 light-years and contains more than a trillion stars.…
Galactic Struggle Captured by Gemini Observatory
The Gemini Multi-Object Spectroraph on the Fredrick C. Gillett Gemini North Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii captured this beautiful…
Keeping an Earthly Eye on Io’s Insane Volcanic Activity
Although space missions Voyager and Galileo observed evidence of volcanic activity on Io, it was a faint blue plume at…
Dying Star Blows Surprising Spiral Bubble
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, astronomers found an unexpected spiral structure surrounding the red giant star R…
Monster Black Holes Lurk at the Edge of Time
The reddish object in this infrared image is ULASJ1234+0907, located about 11 billion light-years from Earth. The red color comes…
Blowing a Super-duper Celestial Bubble
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/U.Mich./S.Oey, IR: NASA/JPL, Optical: ESO/WFI/2.2-m. Zoom by John Williams/TerraZoom using Zoomify When NASA combines images from different…
Finding Life in All the Unlikely, Unexpected Places
Just one of several weather stations set up at Chott El Jerid, a Tunisian saltpan, measuring temperature, humidity, ultraviolet radiation,…