Tagged: stars

An international team of astronomers has observed and identified a new type of stellar explosion — a micronova. Using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), the researchers witnessed never-before-seen small thermonuclear explosions on white dwarf stars that lasted only a matter of...

Earth’s biggest construction project What if humans could harness all the sun’s energy? What if extraterrestrial civilizations have already learned to harvest the energy of stars? In 1960, physicist and astronomer Freeman J. Dyson proposed to use orbiting solar collectors to accomplish this mind-boggling feat....

Young stars can release flares more powerful than our sun’s largest on record once a week, according to a massive new analysis of stellar activity. Scientists believe that stellar flares play a crucial role in shaping the early history of nearby planets. For example, flares...

A dramatic new image of a cosmic gas bubble reveals never-before-seen details of this birthplace of stars. The bubble surrounds the Westerlund 2 star cluster, one of the brightest star-forming regions in the Milky Way. Westerlund 2 is about 20,000 light-years from Earth, and it...

A cluster composed of thousands of stars may dissolve to become a mob of dozens of black holes in a billion years, a new study finds. This dark fate may arise from the actions of a few black holes that may currently lie within that...

Astronomers have made the rare sighting of two stars spiraling to their doom by spotting the tell-tale signs of a teardrop-shaped star. The tragic shape is caused by a massive nearby white dwarf distorting the star with its intense gravity, which will also be the...

Historically most scientists thought that once a satellite galaxy has passed close by its higher mass parent galaxy, its star formation would stop because the larger galaxy would remove the gas from it, leaving it shorn of the material it would need to make new...

Astronomers have identified many more or less spherical clumps of stars born together and still traveling together through space. We call them open star clusters; many are well known as beautiful places in the sky to see through binoculars or a small telescope. On January...

Space Mysteries: An international team of astronomers is on the hunt for objects that should be impossible. Stars don’t just vanish — or do they? For thousands of years, astronomers accepted the idea that the lights in the sky were fixed and unchanging. Even when...

What does a lead nucleus and a neutron star have in common? Scientists have made new estimates of the size of mysterious neutron stars, revealing that the ultradense stellar corpses are slightly larger than previously thought. According to the new estimates, published April 27 in...