Tagged: stars

NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will see thousands of exploding stars called supernovae across vast stretches of time and space. Using these observations, astronomers aim to shine a light on several cosmic mysteries, providing a window onto the universe’s distant past and hazy...

In a nearby stellar nursery called the Orion Nebula, young, massive stars are blasting far-ultraviolet light at the cloud of dust and gas from which they were born. This intense flood of radiation is violently disrupting the cloud by breaking apart molecules, ionizing atoms and...

Scientists have succeeded in dating some of the oldest stars in the galaxy with unprecedented precision by combining data from the stars’ oscillations with information about their chemical composition. The team, led by researchers at the University of Birmingham, surveyed around 100 red giant stars,...

Europium is the key for understanding the formation of the heavy elements by the fast neutron capture process, the so-called r-process. This is crucial both for the formation of half of the elements heavier than iron and for the total abundance of thorium and uranium...

A team including Northwestern University astrophysicists has developed the most realistic, highest-resolution 3D simulation of star formation to date. The result is a visually stunning, mathematically-driven marvel that allows viewers to float around a colorful gas cloud in 3D space while watching twinkling stars emerge....

Astronomers commonly refer to massive stars as the chemical factories of the Universe. They generally end their lives in spectacular supernovae, events that forge many of the elements on the periodic table. How elemental nuclei mix within these enormous stars has a major impact on...

When a massive star dies, first there is a supernova explosion. Then, what’s left over becomes either a black hole or a neutron star. That neutron star is the densest celestial body that astronomers can observe, with a mass about 1.4 times the size of...

In October 2017, humanity caught its first-ever glimpse of an interstellar object—a visitor from beyond our solar system—passing nearby the sun. We named it “Oumuamua, and its unusual properties fascinated and confounded astronomers. Less than two years later, amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov found a second...

A Dutch-led team of astronomers has discovered that high-mass stars are formed differently from their smaller siblings. Whereas small stars are often surrounded by an orderly disk of dust and matter, the supply of matter to large stars is a chaotic mess. The researchers used...

A dynamo mechanism could explain the incredibly strong magnetic fields in white dwarf stars according to an international team of scientists, including a University of Warwick astronomer. One of the most striking phenomena in astrophysics is the presence of magnetic fields. Like the Earth, stars...