There was only a cloud of gas and microscopic dust orbiting a newborn star—our Sun. The story of how that dust became a planet is one of the most incredible transformations in the universe. It started with a force you experience when you rub a balloon on your hair: static electricity. In the vacuum of space, gravity is too weak to pull tiny dust grains together. Instead, electrostatic forces caused these microscopic particles to cling to each other, forming fluffy clumps of cosmic dust bunnies.

Warped World • Black Hole Accretion Disk Visualization 10.12.2020 • (Schematic in post comments) This movie shows a complete revolution around a simulated black hole and its accretion disk following a path that is perpendicular to the disk. The black hole’s extreme gravitational field redirects and distorts 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. As our viewpoint r