NASA’s new 3-dimensional portrait of methane shows the world’s second-largest contributor to greenhouse warming as it travels through the atmosphere. Combining multiple data sets from emissions inventories and simulations of wetlands into a high-resolution computer model, researchers now have an additional tool for understanding this complex gas and its role in Earth’s carbon cycle, atmospheric composition, and climate system. The new data visualization builds a fuller picture of the diversity of methane sources on the ground as well as the behavior of the gas as it moves through the atmosphere.

This is a demonstration of a point-matching algorithm, Bayesian coherent point drift.

Seen nearly edgewise, the turbulent disk of gas churning around a black hole takes on a crazy double-humped appearance. The black hole's extreme gravity alters the paths of light coming from different parts of the disk, producing the warped image. The black hole's extreme gravitational field redirects and distorts the light coming from different parts of the disk, but exactly what we see depends on our viewing angle. The greatest distortion occurs when viewing the system nearly edgewise. 

The second phase of a new asteroid collision model, shows the effect gravity has on the pieces that fly off an asteroid’s surface after impact. This phase occurs over many hours.

Erika Nesvold and Marc Kuchner discuss how their new supercomputer simulation helps astronomers understand Beta Pictoris.

11-second movie shows a computational simulation of a collision of two converging streams of interstellar gas, leading to collapse and formation of a star cluster at the center. Edge-on view shows a cross section through the two streams as they meet. Numbers rapidly increasing at upper left shows the passage of time in millions of years. Left panel shows the density of interstellar gas (yellow and red are densest) and right panel shows red and blue “tracer dyes” added to watch how the gas mixes during the collapse. Circles outlined in black are stars; stars are shown as white in the left panel, and in the right panel their color reflects the amount of the two tracer dyes in each star. The simulation reveals that gas streams are thoroughly homogenized within a very short time of...

Follow a coronal mass ejection as is passes Venus then Earth, and explore how the sun drives Earth's winds and oceans.  Completed: 2012-06-14 Animators: Greg Shirah (NASA/GSFC) (Lead)   Horace Mitchell (NASA/GSFC)   Tom Bridgman (GST)   Ernie Wright (USRA)   Trent L. Schindler (USRA)   Cindy Starr (GST)   Lori Perkins (NASA/GSFC) Video Editor: Stuart A. Snodgrass (HTSI) Narrators: Liam Neeson (Self)   Michael Starobin (HTSI) Producers: Thomas Lucas (Thomas Lucas Productions)   Horace Mitchell (NASA/GSFC)   Greg Shirah (NASA/GSFC) Writer: Thomas Lucas (Thomas Lucas Productions) Platforms/Sensors/Data Sets: Enlil Heliospheric...

Proteins control nearly all life's functions, but how they self-assemble or fold, is an unsolved problem in biology. Understanding how folding goes awry...