Have you ever gazed up at the sky and wondered why clouds look so incredibly different from one another? One moment, you spot fluffy cotton ... Read more The post What Makes Clouds Look So Different?

I love the different forms they take. There are the puffy cotton ball-like clouds against the blue sky — those iconic cumulus clouds. There are curlicue cirrus clouds wafting high above made of ice.

NORFOLK, Va. — Spotting a cumulus cloud is pretty easy. The clouds resemble pieces of cotton candy, but why are cumulus clouds fluffy and not flat? To fully understand why, we need to start with ...

Nothing in her lab actually looks like a cloud; there are no mists swirling picturesquely in glass bottles. It’s mostly lasers and big black boxes. But the behavior of these lab-based cloud particles ...

Stratus clouds are the clouds you see on a mostly overcast day and are not tall. They are more of a blanket of the sky. Nimbostratus are the ones you’ll see when it’s raining and overcast.

Each was nurturing baby stars 20 times the mass of our Sun. About 60 percent of the molecular clouds they observed formed a filament. The remaining 40 percent had a fluffy shape. The filament clouds ...

ALMA 0.1 pc View of Molecular Clouds Associated with High-mass Protostellar Systems in the Small Magellanic Cloud: Are Low-metallicity Clouds Filamentary or Not? The Astrophysical Journal , 2025 ...