Unusual Testbed For Analyzing X-ray Navigation Technologies Built By NASA
NASA Pulsars have a number of unusual qualities. Like zombies, they shine even though they’re technically dead, and they rotate rapidly, emitting powerful and regular beams of radiation that are seen as flashes of light, blinking on and off...
Latest Star types Stories
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Astronomers have found a way to test Einstein's theory of gravity in ways that were not possible before now, thanks to new observations of a very unique system. A team used telescopes around the world to study the most massive neutron star confirmed so far, orbited by a white dwarf. The scientists wrote in the journal Science that so far the new observations match up with Einstein's predictions for general relativity. Einstein's...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A dead star, known as a white dwarf, will eventually cool down and fade away because it has no energy source. A new study led by Professor Dan Maoz of Tel Aviv University's School of Physics and Astronomy suggests that white dwarfs can still support habitable planets. The team, which includes Prof. Avi Loeb, Director of Harvard University's Institute for Theory and Computation and a Sackler Professor by Special Appointment at TAU,...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A team of astronomers, led by Hugues Sana of the University of Amsterdam, has observed a binary star that potentially weighed 300 to 400 times the mass of our Sun at its birth. The present day combined mass of the two stars is between 200 and 300 times the solar mass, depending on its evolutionary stage. This makes it potentially the most massive binary star discovered to date. The findings of this study have been published in...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Using observations made from the Suzaku satellite, a joint venture between Japan's space agency and NASA, an international team of researchers has found that the star responsible for Johannes Kepler’s famous supernova contained a much higher heavy metal content that our own sun. After determining the makeup of the distant star, the scientists said they have a greater understanding of Ia supernovae, a useful class of stellar...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Supernovae are important astronomical objects. They tell us about how stars die and are used as measuring sticks to investigate distant galaxies. But there is still some uncertainty as to how the supernova process proceeds in some cases. It is believed that the most common progenitor of Type II supernova is the collapse of supergiant stars. In this phase of their evolution stars oscillate between red supergiant and more...
GREENBELT, Md., April 5, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Neutron-star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), which NASA recently selected as its next Explorer Mission of Opportunity, will gather scientific data revealing the physics of the densest matter allowed in nature, and--from the same platform--will demonstrate a groundbreaking navigation technology that could revolutionize the agency's ability to travel to the far reaches of the solar system and beyond. (Logo:...
[ Watch the Video: Dead Star Warps Light of Red Star ] redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online NASA's Kepler space telescope has observed the effects of a dead star bending the light of its companion star, one of the first detections of this phenomenon in double star systems. The dead star, known as a white dwarf, is the burnt-out core of what used to be a star much like our sun. It is locked in an orbiting pattern with its partner, a small "red dwarf" star, which is...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has identified the cause of Kepler's supernova, the famous explosion first discovered by Johannes Kepler in 1604. The image above shows low (red), intermediate (green) and high (blue) energy X-rays with a star field background from the Digitized Sky Survey. It is already known that the supernova is a Type Ia, which is the thermonuclear explosion of a white dwarf star. Type Ia's are important cosmic...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The densest matter in the Universe outside of black holes is contained in neutron stars, the ultra-dense cores left behind after massive stars collapse. One of the most reliable determinations yet of the relationship between the radius of a neutron star and its mass has been provided by new results from NASA's Chandra, along with European Space Agency's (ESA) XMM-Newton and NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE), which constrain how...
[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers have now accurately measured the distance to our neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Scientists have struggled with trying to find an accurate distance to the LMC, which is one of the nearest galaxies to the Milky Way. However, a team of astronomers used observations of a rare class of double star, known as eclipsing binaries, to determine that LMC lies 163,000 light-years...
Latest Star types Reference Libraries
X-Ray Astronomy -- Although the more energetic X-rays (E > 30 keV) can penetrate the air at least for distances of a few meters (they would never have been detected and medical X-ray machines would not work if this was not the case) the Earth's atmosphere is thick enough that virtually none are able to penetrate from outer space all the way to the Earth's surface. X-rays in the 0.5 - 5 keV range, where most celestial sources give off the bulk of their energy, can be stopped by a few...
Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram -- In stellar astronomy, the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (H-R diagram) shows the relation between the absolute magnitude and the spectral types of stars. It was invented around 1910 by Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell. There are two equivalent forms. One is the observer's form which plots the color of the star on one axis and the absolute magnitude on the other axis. The theoretician's form plots the temperature of the star on one axis and the...
X-ray Pulsar -- This dramatic artist's vision shows a city-sized neutron star centered in a disk of hot plasma drawn from its enfeebled red companion star. Ravenously accreting material from the disk, the neutron star spins faster and faster emitting powerful particle beams and pulses of X-rays as it rotates 400 times a second. Could such a bizarre and inhospitable star system really exist in our Universe? Based on data from the orbiting Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite,...
X-ray Burster -- X-ray bursters are a class of binary stars which are luminous in X-rays. They contain a neutron star and a low-mass companion star. The companion fills its Roche lobe and therefore the neutron star is accreting matter from it. The inflowing gas forms an accretion disk around the neutron star. Sometimes X-ray bursters show a sudden increase in their X-ray luminosity, called X-ray burst. All properties of the X-ray bursts can be explained assuming that they result from...
X-ray Binaries -- X-ray binaries are a class of binary stars that are very luminous in X-rays. The X-rays are produced by matter falling from one component (usually a relatively normal star) to the other component, which is a neutron star or a black hole. The infalling matter releases gravitational potential energy, up to several tens of per cent of its rest mass as X-rays. (Hydrogen fusion releases about 0.7 per cent of rest mass) X-ray binaries are further subdivided into...
![Protostar G35 Imagery From the SOFIA\](/media/gallery/sofia-stratospheric-observatory-for-infrared-astronomy/thumbs/thumbs_742079main_protostar_g35_fig_1a_1b_150_full_0.jpg "Protostar G35 Imagery From the SOFIA\")
![Protostar G35 Imagery From the SOFIA\](/media/gallery/sofia-stratospheric-observatory-for-infrared-astronomy/thumbs/thumbs_742079main_protostar_g35_fig_1a_1b_150_full.jpg "Protostar G35 Imagery From the SOFIA\")
