At the European Southern Observatory, La Silla, Chile. Photo courtesy Alan Fitzsimmons/ESO
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Corey S Powell is an editor and journalist with a special fondness for all things astronomical and particulate. He spent 15 years at Discover, and was the magazine’s editor-in-chief for four years. Prior to that, he was a longtime member of the Board of Editors at Scientific American. Since then, he has been an editor at Aeon. He is the author of God in the Equation (2003), an examination of the spiritual impulse in modern cosmology. He also collaborated with Bill Nye on his books Unstoppable (2016), Undeniable (2014) and Everything All at Once (2017), and together they make the Science Rules! podcast. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
At the European Southern Observatory, La Silla, Chile. Photo courtesy Alan Fitzsimmons/ESO
Corey S Powell
Out of this world; spirit photography by William Hope c1920. Courtesy National Media Museum/Wikipedia
Paul Halpern
Artist’s impression of asteroid mining. Photo courtesy NASA
Philip Metzger
The law of freefall; Elizabeth Becker at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. Photo by Bettmann/Getty
Dan Falk
A scanning electron microscope image shows a nematode in biofilm (blue), in its natural deep-subsurface habitat. The scale bar is 20 micrometres (μm) long. All images courtesy Gaetan Borgonie
Gaetan Borgonie & Maggie Lau
‘Lucy’ skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis, 3.2 million years old (left), and ‘Neo’ skeleton of Homo naledi, roughly 250,000 years old (right). Photo: Wits University/John Hawks
Paige Madison
Development in Brown 1933, by Wassily Kandinsky. Photo by Christophel Fine Art/Getty
Philip Ball
Illustration by Matt Murphy at Handsome Frank
J Richard Gott
Where to look? Preparing to view an eclipse in Maywood, Illinois, 1963. Photo by Getty
Daniel Whiteson
Italian nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo walks through the streets of Moscow following his defection to Russia, 12 March 1955. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images
David Kaiser
Photo by duncan1890/getty
Philip Ball
Photo by Markus Varesvuo/Nature Picture Library/Getty
Paul Halpern
Detail from an impressionistic poster of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system. Amanda Smith/IoA
Amaury Triaud & Michaël Gillon
Cometh the man; Francis Bacon’s insight was that the process of discovery was inherently algorithmic. Photo courtesy NPG/Wikipedia
Ahmed Alkhateeb
An infrared image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows the centre of the Milky Way galaxy where the brightest white spot marks the site of a supermassive black hole. Photo by NASA/Caltech/JPL
Sabine Hossenfelder
Bits of stuff called matter. Photo by Peter Marlow/Magnum
Adam Frank
Photo by Rex
Simson L Garfinkel
Atomised: detail from The Jubilee Plantation by William Wilkins, 1980, oil on canvas. Private collection. © William Wilkins.
Carlo Rovelli
Photo by Ralph Lee Hopkins/National Geographic
David Grinspoon
Berries hang on the wall of a house in a village inside Chernobyl’s exclusion zone. Photo by Rena Effendi/National Geographic/Getty
Kate Brown & Olha Martynyuk
Photo by Christopher Anderson/Magnum
Sidney Perkowitz
S Pakhrin/Flickr
Riley Black