This new, immersive visualization produced on a NASA supercomputer represents a scenario where a camera — a stand-in for a daring astronaut — just misses the event horizon and slingshots back out. This version is a 360-degree video that lets viewers look all around during the trip. Goddard scientists created the visualizations on the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation. The destination is a supermassive black hole with 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun, equivalent to the monster located at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. To simplify the complex calculations, the black hole is not rotating. A flat, swirling cloud of hot, glowing gas called an accretion disk surrounds the black hole and serves as a visual reference during the fall. So do glowing...

This is a temperature map of the exoplanet WASP-43 b, made using MIRI on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The planet is too close to its star to be seen individually, but its brightness was calculated by measuring the brightness of the star-planet system as a whole. WASP-43 b is tidally locked and has an average temperature of 2,280°F (1,250°C) on the dayside and 1,115°F (600°C) on the nightside. The temperature map shows that the nightside is covered in thick, high clouds, which make it appear cooler than it would if there were no clouds.

NASA/Kasey Dillahay

The Sun is near the maximum phase of the solar cycle, so the solar magnetic field is evolving rapidly. This predictive model is updated in near real-time with the latest measurements of the surface magnetic field. This animation shows how the Sun and the prediction are evolving with time. Credits: Predictive Science Inc.