Tagged: stars

This overlay shows radio (orange) and infrared images of a giant molecular cloud called W49A, where new stars are being formed. A team of astronomers led by Chris DePree of Agnes Scott College used the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA)...

A curiously yellow pre-supernova star has caused astrophysicists to re-evaluate what’s possible at the deaths of our Universe’s most massive stars. The team describe the peculiar star and its resulting supernova in a new study published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society....

A hunt for hypothetical axions streaming from Betelgeuse turns up empty but helps physicists set constraints on their properties. Deep in its searing hot belly, the giant red star Betelgeuse could be producing tons of hypothetical dark matter particles called axions that, if they exist,...

The Galaxy’s most common type of star could host habitable Earth-sized planets. Some of the stars nearest to the Solar System are likely to host planets just like home — roughly the size of Earth and capable of bearing liquid water — according to a...

Sitting for an interview in his office at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CFA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the normally voluble astronomer Dimitar Sasselov looks nervous. Asked for his favourite among the many potential planets discovered by NASA’s Kepler planet-finding mission, for which he is a...

Data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope have revolutionized the search for planets outside the Solar System — and are now doing the same for asteroseismology. Most astronomers gaze at the heavens and see stars. William Chaplin hears an orchestra — a celestial symphony in which...

Kepler data spur searches for habitable planets around small, low-temperature stars. The eight 40-centimetre telescopes of MEarth are hunting for Earth analogues around M-dwarf stars. An Earth-like planet — and with it, perhaps life — does not have to orbit a Sun-like star. That idea...

The latest star data from the Gaia space observatory has for the first time allowed astronomers to generate a massive 3-D atlas of widely separated binary stars within about 3,000 light years of Earth—1.3 million of them. The one-of-a-kind atlas, created by Kareem El-Badry, an...

Space scientists at the University of Bath in the UK have found a new way to probe the internal structure of neutron stars, giving nuclear physicists a novel tool for studying the structures that make up matter at an atomic level. Neutron stars are dead...

A new study shows a correlation between the end of solar cycles and a switch from El Nino to La Nina conditions in the Pacific Ocean, suggesting that solar variability can drive seasonal weather variability on Earth. If the connection outlined in the journal Earth...