Spend the Night in an Edward Hopper Painting

Coinciding with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’s Edward Hopper and the American Hotel exhibition, the institution will allows guests to walk through—and even spend the night—in a three-dimensional recreation of the artist’s painting, “Western Motel.” An exemplary study on isolation (a persistent theme in Hoppers work), the “Western Motel” experience will happen on the museum grounds. The exhibition will also feature more than 60 …

Inside Virgin Galactic’s Spaceport Terminal

Founded in 2004 by Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic is an airline that offers trips to the outer rim of our atmosphere—taking off from a strip of dusty land in New Mexico. Tickets start at $200,000 and will afford passengers the opportunity to enter space—a claim typically reserved for NASA-trained astronauts. The trip lasts 90 minutes, courtesy of a supersonic plane, but hours more could …

Astronomers Detect an Unprecedented Glow from the Center of Our Galaxy

At the center of our galaxy is the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. Though it has a history of flickering, it has never glowed like it did in April and May, new research tells us. Twice, both times over the course of four nights, the light around its core glowed at “unprecedented” levels—so much that some astronomers believed they’d discovered a star. Minutes later, the …