Latest Star types Stories
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A bright new star outshone even Jupiter in 1604 and then it dimmed over several weeks. Johannes Kepler and other sky watchers witnessed this event, and centuries later, the debris left from this stellar explosion is known at the Kepler supernova remnant. Astronomers have studied the Kepler supernova remnant for a long time trying to determine exactly what happened when the star exploded. New analysis of a long observation by NASA's...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers now believe the "monster stars" located in the nearby galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) were formed through the merger of lighter stars. The team wrote in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that the group of stars may have formed while smaller stars were in a tight binary system. In 2010, scientists discovered these supermassive stars, one of which is more than 300 times the mass of the...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A progenitor of a type 1a supernova may have been found, according to findings published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Astronomers believe that type 1a supernovae are thermonuclear explosions of a white dwarf star that is part of a binary system, which is two stars that are physically close and orbit a common center of mass. The white dwarf has mass gradually given to it by its companion star, and...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online In a galaxy not that far away, astronomically speaking at least, researchers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have detected the first x-rays emitted by the debris of a young supernova, SN 1957D. 15 million light years from Earth, in the M83 spiral galaxy, SN 1957D is one of only a few supernova located outside the Milky Way galaxy that is detectable in both radio and optical wavelengths, decades after the explosion itself was...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The brightest stars in the universe apparently do not like to live alone, according to a new study using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT). Nearly three-quarters of the brightest, high mass stars are found to have a close companion star, which is far more than previous thought. Most of these pairs of stars are also experiencing disruptive interactions, like mass transfer from one star to the other. Another third of them are expected...
[ Watch the Video ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A special gamma-ray pulsar with the hiccups has been discovered by researchers from the Max Planck Institutes for Gravitational Physics and Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) using data constructed from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The pulsar J1838-0537 is very young, and has experienced the strongest rotation glitch ever observed for a gamma-ray-only pulsar. Pure gamma-ray pulsars are difficult to identify...
[ Watch the Video ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online One recently discovered star seems to have a split personality, with both a magnetar and pulsar consuming the object. The European Space Agency (ESA) said the newly discovered star appears to be a pulsar while hiding an intense internal magnetic field like a magnetar. The internal field is many times stronger than its external magnetic field, leading to its entry into the new class of "low-field...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers have discovered four pairs of stars that orbit each other in less than four hours, according to findings published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Using the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii, astronomers observed something scientists thought couldn't exist. It was always thought that if binary stars form too close to each other, they would end up merging into one...
[ Watch the Video ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Researchers may have discovered the fastest moving pulsar ever seen using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton. Astronomers used X-ray observations, combined with infrared data from the 2MASS project and optical data from the Digitized Sky Survey to find evidence for the record-breaking pulsar. The XMM-Newton image was produced when a massive star exploded as a supernova, leaving behind a...
Astronomers are getting to know the neighbors better. Our sun resides within a spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy about two-thirds of the way out from the center. It lives in a fairly calm, suburb-like area with an average number of stellar residents. Recently, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has been turning up a new crowd of stars close to home: the coldest of the brown dwarf family of "failed" stars. Now, just as scientists are "meeting and greeting" the new...
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...
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