Latest Star types Stories

NASA's Swift satellite puts faraway stars and galaxies under a new lens. A combination of X-ray and ultraviolet observations from NASA's Swift satellite allow researchers to gain a more detailed look at specific stars and their activities. Most recently Swift was used to study a Type Ia supernova. While it's been known that Type Ia supernovae originate with a remnant star called a white dwarf, the X-ray and ultraviolet views allow researchers to view the events and matter that cause the...

Using radio and infrared telescopes, astronomers have obtained a first tantalizing look at a crucial early stage in star formation. The new observations promise to help scientists understand the early stages of a sequence of events through which a giant cloud of gas and dust collapses into dense cores that, in turn, form new stars. The scientists studied a giant cloud about 770 light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus. They used the European Space Agency's Herschel Space...

A neutron star is the closest thing to a black hole that astronomers can observe directly, crushing half a million times more mass than Earth into a sphere no larger than a city. In October 2010, a neutron star near the center of our galaxy erupted with hundreds of X-ray bursts that were powered by a barrage of thermonuclear explosions on the star's surface. NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) captured the month-long fusillade in extreme detail. Using this data, an international team of...

Pitt team used Sloan Digital Sky Survey to determine that the merger of double white dwarfs is a plausible explanation for Type Ia supernovae The origin of an important type of exploding stars—Type Ia supernovae—have been discovered, thanks to a research team at the University of Pittsburgh. Studying supernovae of this type helps researchers measure galaxy distances and can lead to important astronomical discoveries. A paper detailing this research has been accepted for publication in...

Researchers from several universities have detected all phases of thermonuclear burning in a neutron star for the first time. The team discovered the "model burster" star located close to the center of the galaxy in the global cluster Terzan 5. The star is the first of its kind to burst the way that models predict, and it could help explain why a model star like it has gone undetected for so long. Astrophysicists have been studying neutron stars for decades to try and understand how...

A spectacularly bright object recently spotted in one of the Milky Way's neighboring galaxies is the result of a "normal" stellar black hole, astronomers have found. An international team of scientists, led by Dr Matt Middleton, of Durham University, analyzed the Ultraluminous X-ray Source (ULX), which was originally discovered in the Andromeda galaxy by NASA's Chandra x-ray observatory. They publish their results in the journals Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and...

Astronomers have clocked the fastest wind yet ever discovered blowing off a disk around a stellar-mass black hole. The team used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to discover that the wind at this black hole is moving about 20 million miles per hour, or about 3 percent of the speed of light. According to NASA, this is nearly 10 times faster than other winds that have been seen around other stellar-mass black holes. "This is like the cosmic equivalent of winds from a category five...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 21, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have clocked the fastest wind yet discovered blowing off a disk around a stellar-mass black hole. This result has important implications for understanding how this type of black hole behaves. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The record-breaking wind is moving about 20 million mph, or about 3 percent of the speed of light. This is nearly 10 times faster...

Pulsars, superdense neutron stars, are perhaps the most extraordinary physics laboratories in the Universe. Research on these extreme and exotic objects already has produced two Nobel Prizes. Pulsar researchers now are poised to learn otherwise-unavailable details of nuclear physics, to test General Relativity in conditions of extremely strong gravity, and to directly detect gravitational waves with a "telescope" nearly the size of our Galaxy. Neutron stars are the remnants of massive...

Stellar astrophysics helps to explain the behavior of fast rotating neutron stars in binary systems Pulsars are among the most exotic celestial bodies known. They have diameters of about 20 kilometers, but at the same time roughly the mass of our sun. A sugar-cube sized piece of its ultra-compact matter on the Earth would weigh hundreds of millions of tons. A sub-class of them, known as millisecond pulsars, spin up to several hundred times per second around their own axes. Previous...