Balmer formula

A cartographer receives a sheet with distances between hundreds of unnamed islands. No island is labeled, but the distances repeat, forming triangles and quadrilaterals. From these repetitions, the cartographer reconstructs the map of the archipelago, not knowing which island is which. This is roughly how the new work in molecular spectroscopy works.

When stars are born in a galaxy, they make hydrogen glow, like a neon sign, but on a cosmic scale. This light could tell us a lot about how many stars are forming, but on its way to us, it passes through cosmic dust. Dust is like a fogged-up window: it dims the glow and alters its color.

Forty reddish sparks frozen in the images from JWST. The telescope spotted them in the depths of space, at distances where the Universe was less than two billion years old. These objects are active galactic nuclei — very compact and unusually red. Their color earned them the nickname 'little red dots' (LRDs).

Each morning, dozens of telescopes swing toward the Sun. Their cameras catch a narrow band of red light — the Hα line, discovered by Johann Balmer. The images reveal dark, whimsically curved threads. They look like stitches in a giant tapestry sewn through the blazing corona.

In 1,433 pairs of galaxies scattered across the sky, astronomers noticed an unusual pattern. Neighbors located 'above' or 'below' a massive stellar system contain up to a quarter more oxygen than those lying in the plane of its disk.

An artist makes a quick charcoal sketch, and the face in the portrait is already recognizable. Astrophysicists face a similar challenge: the spectrum of a star is its individual portrait, revealing temperature, composition, and gravity.

The Sun is not just a blazing ball, but a colossal orchestra, where the strings are solar filaments — giant arches of dense plasma floating in the scorching corona. They tremble, and each oscillation is an encrypted melody of magnetic fields.

A stone falls into water, and ripples spread in all directions. Throw a handful of stones at once, and the ripples overlap: you can no longer tell which ripple came from which stone. A neutron beam hitting a detector looks much the same: a bright spot blurred by many causes.

The James Webb Space Telescope peered into the era when the expansion of the Universe stretched the light of distant objects into the red, and found a scattering of strange sources — 'little red dots'. Their spectra broke the usual patterns: they are blue in the ultraviolet, but deep red in the optical, as if seen through a cherry veil.

The antiproton is a mirror twin of the proton: same mass, but negative charge. When it approaches an atomic nucleus, the particles can annihilate, turning into radiation.