An animation shows how an infrared laser beam (orange) triggers atomic vibrations in a thin layer of iron selenide, which are then recorded by ultrafast X-ray laser pulses (white) to create an ultrafast movie.
Some 150 million years ago, a strange creature died in a tropical lagoon that today is located in Bavaria, Germany. In 1861, a single feather of this creature was discovered. Not long afterward, a complete fossil was found with the...
The Mary Rose, built in 1511, was the flagship of King Henry VIII. She sank in 1545 while en route to confront the French fleet in battle. The ship lay undersea for 440 years before being raised in 1985. The...
What was the first thing in the Universe? A black hole or a star? How did it form? Even our biggest and best telescopes cannot tell us. Direct calculation with supercomputers, however, can. The first luminous objects in the Universe...
Presented by Marusa Bradac. One of the greatest accomplishments in recent astrophysics is the creation of a model for the complete inventory of the Universe. All the observational data tells us with extremely high certainty that ordinary matter (every particle...
Presented by Kelly Gaffney. Movies have transformed our perception of the world. With slow motion photography, we can see a hummingbird flap its wings, and a bullet pierce an apple. The remarkably small and extremely fast molecular world that determines...
Presented by Sean Brennan. The Stardust mission returned from a 6-year voyage in January of 2006. During the mission it swept through the tail of comet Wild 2 (pronounced Vilt), collecting the microscopic particles streaming from it.
In experiments resembling an atomic-scale shooting gallery, researchers are pioneering a new method for chemical analysis by zapping the innermost electrons out of atoms with powerful X-ray laser pulses from SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS).
In repeatedly and systematically surveying the sky with deep, large-field-of-view images in six optical color bands on a 3 billion pixel camera for years, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will home in on the nature of dark energy and increase...
Technology that helps ground-based telescopes cut through the haze of Earth's atmosphere to get a clearer view of the heavens may also be used to collect better data at cutting-edge X-ray lasers like the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at...
