Nearby Flare Star Gives Off Explosive Burst Of Light
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Within a span of three minutes, a star in the Usra Major constellation less than 16 light-years from Earth gave off a massive flare, making the object 15 times brighter than normal, according...
Latest Proxima Centauri Stories
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Besides our own Sun, the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to Earth. As such, astronomers have sought to determine if planets orbit the tiny object. But because of its low brightness, and other issues, previous attempts to find planets using traditional methods have failed. But researchers have now determined that two unique opportunities -- one in October 2014, another in February 2016 -- will allow...
WASHINGTON, June 3, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope will have two opportunities in the next few years to hunt for Earth-sized planets around the red dwarf Proxima Centauri. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The opportunities will occur in October 2014 and February 2016 when Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to our sun, passes in front of two other stars. Astronomers plotted Proxima Centauri's precise path in the heavens and...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Using data obtained from a NASA satellite, a Pennsylvania State University astronomer has identified the closest solar system to be found within the past 97 years. According to astronomer Kevin Luhman’s report in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the newly identified system is a pair of brown dwarf stars and the third-closest system to the Sun. “The distance to this brown dwarf pair is 6.5 light years -- so close that Earth's...
WASHINGTON, Dec. 10, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Using computer simulations, scientists from the NASA Astrobiology Institute team at the University of Hawaii are shedding light on a question that has challenged astronomers for years: What causes wide binary stars? (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO ) Binary stars are pairs of stars that orbit each other. Wide binary stars are separated by as much as one light-year in their orbits, farther apart than some...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists have reported in the journal Nature that they have figured out by using computer simulations how wide binary stars are able to form. Wide binary stars are two stars that orbit each other at a distance up to a light year. Some binary stars can be very close, while other pairs are extremely far apart. Astronomers have known about wide binary pairs for a long time, but how they form has remained a mystery. Now, astronomers...
Video 1 | Video 2 Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers have discovered a planet similar in mass to the Earth orbiting a star in the Alpha Centauri system — the nearest to Earth. Surpisingly, according to the astronomers, this planet which is just 4 light years away is also the lightest ever discovered around a star like our Sun. While the planet itself may be more similar in size and mass than Venus is to Earth, that’s where the good news ends. The...
[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online A telescope launched on board a NASA sounding rocket earlier this month has captured the highest-resolution images of the sun's corona, the US space agency announced on Friday. The 16-megapixel images of the million-degree atmosphere of the sun were captured in an extreme-ultraviolet wavelength of light by the High Resolution Coronal Images (Hi-C) telescope, according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center...
A team of scientists has created an "MRI" of the Sun's interior plasma motions, shedding light on how it transfers heat from its deep interior to its surface. The result, which appears in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, upends our understanding of how heat is transported outwards by the Sun and challenges existing explanations of the formation of sunspots and magnetic field generation. The work was conducted by researchers from NYU's Courant Institute of...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online With some inspiration from the studies of ocean life forms, a British space expert envisages alien lifeforms that resemble jellyfish with organs developed to ingest methane and other chemicals for its nutrition, keeping aloft by means of dangling onion-like buoyancy bags, and communicating with pulses of light. Dr. Maggie Aderin-Peacock, a leading scientist at the European space company Astrium, described her vision of what might...
[ Watch the Video ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com The sun is a ferocious, hot mess, and this week it showed off through a coronal mass ejection just how messy it can get. An active region on the sun fired off two M-class flares and two coronal mass ejections (CMEs) this week. NASA said the first flare lasted for three hours, and peaked on June 13 at 9:17 a.m. EDT. The CME associated with the flare traveled up at approximately 375 miles per second. The second flare peaked on...
Latest Proxima Centauri Reference Libraries
Centaurus Constellation -- Centaurus (the centaur) was one of the 48 constellations listed by Ptolemy, and counts also among the 88 modern constellations. A constellation of the southern hemisphere, mentioned by Eudoxus (4th century B.C.) and Aratus (3rd century B.C.), Ptolemy catalogued thirty-seven stars in it. It contains Proxima Centauri, the red dwarf that is the nearest known star (other than the Sun) to Earth, as well as Alpha Centauri, which is a double star to which Proxima...
Red Dwarf -- A red dwarf is a small star on the main sequence, either late K or M spectral type. They have a diameter and mass of less than one-third that of the Sun (down to 0.08 solar masses, which are Brown dwarves) and a surface temperature of less than 3,500 K. They emit little light, sometimes as little as 1/10,000th that of the sun. Due to the slow rate at which they burn hydrogen red dwarves have a enormous lifespan, estimates range from a tens of billions up to trillions of...
Proxima Centauri -- The red dwarf star Proxima Centauri (also Alpha Centauri C), part of the Alpha Centauri star system, is the nearest star to our Earth other than the Sun. Proxima Centauri is roughly 4.22 light years from Earth, 270,000 times as far as the sun. Its apparent magnitude is 11 (very weak, as red dwarfs in general are: far too weak to be observable with the naked eye). Proxima Centauri has often been suggested as a logical first destination for interstellar travel....
Brown Dwarf -- Brown dwarfs are a special type of low-mass star (approximately 13-70 Jupiter masses) that do not have nuclear fusion occurring in their cores during their time on the main sequence. Early in their development most brown dwarf stars do have lithium fusion in their cores, and a lack of lithium is a test for low-mass objects that are suspected of being brown dwarfs. Many brown dwarfs continue to glow in the red and infrared after their lithium is exhausted. This glow is...
Alpha Centauri -- Alpha Centauri is the brightest star system in the southern constellation of Centaurus, and is the third brightest in the entire night sky (although too far south to be visible in most of the northern hemisphere). It is also the closest star system to Earth. It bears the proper name Rigil Kentaurus (often shortened to Rigil Kent), meaning "foot of the centaur" in Arabic, but is nonetheless usually referred to by its Bayer designation Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri is...
