Tagged: star

Evidence of a neutron star hidden deep inside Supernova 1987A is helping astronomers solve a 33-year-old mystery surrounding one of the brightest star explosions ever observed. On Feb. 23, 1987, astronomers witnessed an incredibly bright stellar explosion, also known as a supernova. Using the Atacama...

Betelgeuse’s odd recent dimming was caused by a huge cloud of material that the supergiant star blasted into space, a new study suggests. The bright star Betelgeuse, which forms the shoulder of the constellation Orion (The Hunter), is about 11 times more massive than the...

In the center of our Milky Way galaxy, scientists have spotted the fastest star ever detected, moving at more than 8% of the speed of light. Our galaxy’s center features the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), which is as massive as about 4...

Scientists have bolstered Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity by exploring the strange mysteries of white dwarf stars. Astronomers have long theorized about the relationship between a white dwarf star’s mass and radius but haven’t been able to observe the stars’ mass-radius relationship until now,...

The fossil record suggests Earth’s ozone layer took a protracted beating One of the worst extinction events in Earth’s history may have been triggered by a supernova, the violent death of a distant star. About 75% of all species on Earth died out at the...

It’s funny how you remember certain events in your life. Recently, my mind wandered back to mid-August of 1975, when I and several friends went camping near the little community of Thurmond, New York in the southern Adirondack Mountains. We had headed there to get...

Gravitational redshift, an effect predicted by Albert Einstein that is crucial for maintaining the Global Positioning System (GPS) on Earth, has been observed in a star system in our galaxy. Within Einstein’s general theory of relativity there is an effect known as “gravitational redshift,” in...

The definition of a star is as rich and colorful as, well, the stars themselves. It’s easy enough to say what a star is. It’s one of those bright pointy things that twinkle in the night sky. But beyond that, the actual definition of a...

Three years ago, two neutron stars collided in a cataclysmic crash, the first such merger ever observed directly. Naturally, scientists kept their eye on it — and now, something strange is happening. Astrophysicists observed the star collision on Aug. 17, 2017, spotting for the first...

Astronomers have discovered black widows and redbacks in space. While these cosmic objects don’t kill and eat their mates, the stars share their eight-legged counterparts’ violent behavior toward companions. In addition to the run-of-the-mill spider stars, the researchers also discovered a bizarre black widow-redback crossbreed....