The universe is a spooky place, filled with zombie stars, invisible matter, and monster galaxies lurking in the silent darkness of the cosmos.
In order to pay tribute to the weird mysteries that surround us, NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program Office produced a set of illustrations meant to look like vintage horror movie posters. All draw inspiration from real cosmic phenomenon like dark matter, gamma ray bursts and exoplanets with hellish conditions.
“One of the things I really like about these posters is that if you spend some time studying the art and then maybe go learn a little more about each of these topics, you’ll see there was a lot of thought by the artists about the choices they made to highlight the science,” Jason Rhodes, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, who consulted on the project, said in a NASA release from 2020.
Read on for such cinematic classics as Dark Matter: Something Else Is Out There and Gamma Ray Ghouls.