Search

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Eta Carinae Eta Carinae and the surrounding Homunculus Nebula show off a range of false colors in this composite image of optical light (white), ultraviolet (cyan), [...]

SOONER OR LATER ON ANY CLEAR, DARK NIGHT, AN ETHEREAL BAND CALLED THE MILKY WAY ARCHES ACROSS THE SKY. Although recognized since antiquity, philosophers and scientists could only guess at [...]

Alone in the night On a dark hill With pines around me Spicy and still, And a heaven full of stars Over my head, White and topaz And misty red; [...]

The universe is teeming with many more massive stars than previously believed, according to a study published January 5 in Science. Since massive stars play a crucial role in shaping [...]

An October 20 paper in Nature argues that blue stragglers, stars that appear younger than they are, likely formed during transfers of material within binary [...]

The oldest stars in the galaxy may have belonged to a hitherto unknown class called 'spinstars,' according to a paper in the April 28 Nature. 'We think that the first [...]

By examining star HD 49933's acoustic fluctuations for 187 days, astronomers have detected the signature of starspots, areas of intense magnetic activity on the star's surface. 'As [HD 49933] moves [...]

For many people, old age is a time of declining vitality--a time when we become less energetic, more sedentary. Not so for big stars. When a massive star becomes a [...]

OLD SOUL TRAPPIST-1, with its seven Earth-sized planets, may predate our own solar system. NASA/JPL researchers place the star's age between 5.4 billion and 10 billion years, far older than [...]

Since 1992, astronomers have discovered more than 3,600 planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. Several thousand more candidates exist. Just where are these planets in the sky? Well, they're [...]

A RUNAWAY PROTOSTAR in the Orion Nebula suggests a tussle occurred between four stars 540 years ago. The protostar, labeled Source X, lies in the vicinity of the Kleinmann-Low Nebula, [...]

Q: WHAT WOULD A URANIAN DAY AND YEAR BE LIKE? WHAT PATH ACROSS THE SKY WOULD THE SUN FOLLOW? Bill McCann, Westminster, Colorado A: Uranus' extreme tilt of 82° (Earth [...]

One of the sun's long lost siblings could be just 110 light-years away. Astronomers have identified a star that might have formed in the same nebula as the sun and [...]

Despite a new analysis of data from the Kepler Space Telescope, the slow-dimming and sporadic flickering of Tabby's star remains a mystery, Christopher Crockett reported in 'Fading star still baffles [...]

Resolving Stars' Disks 'The astronomer's impossible dream has always been to resolve features on the disks of stars. Optically it can't be done, [but] an ingenious trick can sometimes accomplish [...]

Three Earth-sized planets orbiting a star practically next-door might be a good place to hunt for alien life--or at least to check out some worlds that are different from anything [...]

SIZE DOES MATTER. Stars arrange into five basic sizes. Sun-like stars (diameter = 1 in this graphic) are easiest to picture. But what about the others, two of which are [...]

Observations suggest that several dozen low-mass stars, and eventually perhaps even planets, are forming just 2 light-years from our galaxy's supermassive black hole. Theorists still don't understand how stars manage [...]

Cyanide shows up in apple seeds, toxicology reports and now a planetary nursery encircling a young star. Compounds found in a planet-forming disk suggest that the brew of organic compounds [...]

Astronomers have spotted what they think is exozodiacal light in nine planetary systems. This light is starlight reflected off dusty debris in the systems. Unlike protoplanetary disks, where gas and [...]

In January 2002, a previously unremarkable star--one of the distant stars forming the hazy band known as the Milky Way--suddenly flared up. The star, in the direction of the constellation […]

Observations of a young star show similarities to what the early solar system might have looked like. Kate Su and Sarah Morrison of the University of Arizona and colleagues found [...]

Not all galaxies are filled with stars. Astronomers have discovered a horde of nearly starless galaxies, each about the size of the Milky Way. How they formed is a mystery, [...]

Certain molecules burst from young stars much faster and with more energy than previously thought. As a young star forms, it throws off material at speeds up to 1 million [...]

The distance, in light-years, between Earth and a record-breaking explosion NASA telescopes detected in April. A burst of energy brighter than 35 billion flashlights shot out of a collapsing [...]

Three mysteriously long bursts of gamma rays, the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation, likely arose from the explosion of a star some thousand times the size of the Sun, [...]

COSMIC JITTERS Astronomers can make big conclusions by studying very subtle differences in telescope observations of stars. However, such precise light measurements are plagued by what researchers call jitters--artifacts in [...]

RARE REBIRTH. Astronomers have uncovered evidence for a dying star briefly coming back to life in these composite images of planetary nebula Abell 30 released November 15. The wide-field view [...]

About 80 light-years away, an enormous, dusty ring swirls around a sunlike star, with a defined inner edge that is probably sculpted by a planet orbiting at 140 times Earth's [...]

Meet VFTSI02, a star that spins so fast it's on the verge of being torn apart by its own centrifugal force. An international team of astronomers spotted the blue giant [...]

Sing a song of bright stars, a pocketful of light, Twenty in the 1st magnitude, and all of them are bright. I WROTE THOSE LINES, in imitation of a well-known [...]