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This illustration shows a star surrounded by a protoplanetary disk. Material from the thick disk flows along the star’s magnetic field lines and is deposited onto the star’s surface. When material hits the star, it lights up brightly. The star’s irregular illumination allows astronomers to measure the gap between the disk and the star by using a technique called “photo-reverberation” or “light echoes.” First, astronomers look at how much time it takes for light from the star to arrive at Earth. Then, they compare that with the time it takes for light from the star to bounce off the inner edge of the disk and then arrive at Earth. That time difference is used to measure distance, as the speed of light is constant. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Cosmic Dust Analyser on the international Cassini spacecraft has detected the faint but distinct signature of dust coming from outside our Solar System, from the local interstellar cloud: an almost empty bubble of gas and dust we are travelling through with a distinct direction and speed. This graphic summarises the location of Saturn, and the Solar System, with respect to the local interstellar cloud, and our place in the Milky Way galaxy. Credit: ESA

Workers representing the repair system known as nucleotide excision repair (NER), repairing DNA and snakes, representing proteins that bind DNA at gene promoters, potentially preventing them from doing this. Credit: Jackie Mostek

Slices of collapsing gas within dark matter halos on three different spacial scales: from 10,0000 to 10 light years across. The colors represent the gas density, from low density (blue color) to much larger density (red color). The gas on the smallest spatial scales is going to form a supermassive black hole. Credit: Isaac Shlosman, University of Kentucky