Tagged: star

The mystery at the heart of an unexplained, bright point of gamma-ray light in the sky has been solved: There’s a deadly spider star flaying a second, wimpier star to bits, sending out rapid-fire bursts of gamma radiation in the process “Black widows” and “redbacks”...

A year ago, the bright red star Betelgeuse in the Orion constellation hit the headlines when stargazers noticed a stark fading episode that astronomers couldn’t explain. They still can’t, although they keep trying. The suspense is particularly high now, since the star, which typically dims...

The idea behind the death of a massive star is relatively straightforward: It gets old, runs out of fuel, collapses under gravity and then explodes as a supernova. After the supernova, all that remains of the once magnificent star is a black hole or neutron...

Astronomers have sparked wild conspiracy theories after discovering a “second Earth” capable of supporting life. Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) spotted an alien world orbiting Proxima Centauri — a red dwarf, a small low-mass star about 4.25 light-years from the Sun. An anonymous source from the ESO...

When the 1933 World’s Fair opened in Chicago, it was marked by a mechanism that captured the light of a distant object: the star Arcturus, shining in the constellation Boötes. World’s Fair organizers had chosen Arcturus, because at the time, it was believed that the...

A DISTANT star has begun exhibiting the same strange behaviour which led astronomers to suggest an “alien megastructure” is orbiting it. Tabby’s Star first attracted the world’s attention last year when stargazers suggested the distinctive “blinking” of its light was caused by a gigantic spaceship passing...

What happens when a star dies? Astronomers thought they had it all figured out. A dying star either fades into a simmering white dwarf, explodes and then shrinks into a super-dense neutron star or collapses into an all-consuming black hole, depending on its mass. However,...

Researchers at NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory may have watched a young star devouring a planet. For decades, scientists have observed irregular dimming of RW Aur A, a young star in the Taurus-Auriga constellation. Questions about this star grew as it began to dim more frequently...

NASA released a dazzling 3D image of the Crab Nebula on Sunday. Astronomers and visualization specialists from NASA have combined the visible, infrared, and X-ray vision of the space agency’s Great Observatories to create a three-dimensional representation of the dynamic Crab Nebula, the tattered remains...

Scientists have used data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope to discover a “vampire” star “sucking” the life out of another star. Experts discovered a surprising “super-outburst” from a dwarf nova, a type of “cataclysmic variable star.” According to NASA, the star system, which consists of...