Author Archives: Chompsky

These are sandcastles.

The brutalist sedimentary architecture of artist and sandcastle maestro Calvin Seibert, conjured from nothing more than sand and water, smoothed and levelled by knife, trowel and hand. Sez he:

I always start at the top and work down, taking great care to keep the horizontals level. I pretty much make things up as I go along, allowing surprises and engineering difficulties to shape the castles.

colossal

Behold: Wolf-Rayet star 124 – the ultimate action hero backdrop –  its violent stellar winds expelling glowing plumes of gas 300 times larger than the earth. To wit:

Wolf-Rayet star WR 124, visible near the featured image center spanning six light years across, is thus creating the surrounding nebula known as M1-67. Details of why this star has been slowly blowing itself apart over the past 20,000 years remains a topic of research. WR 124 lies 15,000 light-years away towards the constellation of the Arrow (Sagitta). The fate of any given Wolf-Rayet star likely depends on how massive it is, but many are thought to end their lives with spectacular explosions such as supernovas or gamma-ray bursts.

(Image: Hubble Legacy Archive, NASA, ESA; Processing & License: Judy Schmidt)

apod

Behold: the Hyundai Prophecy – an aesthetic ‘Porsche-meets-Tesla-Model-3’ concept from the normally dowdy South Korean maker with ‘ideal’ proportions including an extended wheelbase, minimal overhangs and a streamlined aerodynamic profile.

The ‘Sensuous Sportiness’ continues with ‘pixelated’ taillights, cavernous passenger space, joystick controls and a pillar-to-pillar instrument display.

Whether the Prophecy will ever be completely fulfilled in production remains unclear but some version of this concept or its constituent parts will probably come to market soon.

uncrate/theverge

Behold: the slow, slow dance of galaxies NGC 5394 and NGC 5395. How slow? Each turn takes several hundred million years. To wit:

NGC 5394 and NGC 5395, slowly whirl about each other in a gravitational interaction that sets off a flourish of sparks in the form of new stars. The featured image, taken with the Gemini North 8-meter telescope on Maunakea, Hawaii, USA, combines four different colours. Emission from hydrogen gas, coloured red, marks stellar nurseries where new stars drive the evolution of the galaxies. Also visible are dark dust lanes that mark gas that will eventually become stellar nurseries. If you look carefully you will see many more galaxies in the background, some involved in their own slow cosmic dances.

(Image: Gemini, NSF, OIR Lab, AURA; Text: Ryan Tanner (NASA/USRA))

apod