EdEon News | September 14, 2026

EdEon Scientific Illustrator, Aurore Simonnet, lands another prominent magazine cover

EdEon graphic artist and scientific illustrator, Aurore Simonnet, has once again had her out-of-this-world art featured as the cover of a prominent magazine. This time it is Astronomy magazine’s August 2026 issue, featuring an article on gravitational waves. 

The inspiration for the cover story came from the recent publication of a paper by the LIGO team describing the fourth dataset in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, published by the American Astronomical Society. You can read the paper here. 

Aurore has also been designing creative ways to imagine universal phenomena, like black holes colliding, while doing her best to make it as accurate a depiction as possible for more than 10 years. She has been designing art and resources for LIGO since before 2016, when EdEon (then EPO) published a guide for students in grades 6 and higher that explains LIGO’s 2015 discovery of gravitational waves from merging black holes.

Aurore’s art has also been put to use on a Nature cover and for other articles as well as for a Science magazine cover, and one of her depictions of merging black holes has captured the hearts and minds of many scientists and professionals in the field. This illustration shows two black holes spinning in a non-aligned fashion, which means they have different orientations relative to the overall orbital motion of the pair. LIGO found hints that at least one black hole in the system called GW170104 was non-aligned with its orbital motion before it merged with its partner. You can read the original press release, featuring Aurore’s merging black holes, here. 

Aurore is still collaborating with LIGO, even ten years after their first big discovery. This artwork imagines the ultimate front-row seat for GW250114, a powerful collision between two black holes observed in gravitational waves by the US National Science Foundation LIGO. To read more about the recent discoveries and see Aurore’s artwork, click here.