Latest Stellar astronomy Stories
A massive star flung away from its former companion is plowing through space dust. The result is a brilliant bow shock, seen here as a yellow arc in a new image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.The star, named Zeta Ophiuchi, is huge, with a mass of about 20 times that of our sun. In this image, in which infrared light has been translated into visible colors we see with our eyes, the star appears as the blue dot inside the bow shock.Zeta Ophiuchi once orbited around an...
A team of astronomers led by graduate student Naslim and her supervisor Dr Simon Jeffery from Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland has found what at first sight appears to be the most zirconium-rich star ever discovered. Zirconium, the material used by jewelers to make false diamonds, glitters in clouds above the star's surface. The scientists publish their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The team made the discovery while looking for chemical clues...
The biggest galaxies in the universe are elliptical galaxies. The largest of these hold over one trillion stars according to astronomical census takers, compared to 400 billion in our Milky Way. However, new research shows that elliptical galaxies actually hold five to ten times as many stars as previously believed. This means that the total number of stars in the universe is likely three times bigger than realized.The hidden stars are known as red dwarfs for their color and small size....
Radio observations show first evidence for magnetic field in protostar jetAstronomers have found the first evidence of a magnetic field in a jet of material ejected from a young star, a discovery that points toward future breakthroughs in understanding the nature of all types of cosmic jets and of the role of magnetic fields in star formation.Throughout the Universe, jets of subatomic particles are ejected by three phenomena: the supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies, smaller...
Researchers from Bonn and St. Andrews provide an explanation for the discrepancyNew stars are born in the Universe around the clock "“ in the Milky Way, currently about ten per year. From the birth rate in the past, we can generally calculate how populated space should actually be. But the problem is that the results of such calculations do not match our actual observations. "There should actually be a lot more stars that we can see," says Dr. Jan Pflamm-Altenburg, astrophysicist...
By Karen C. Fox, NASA's Goddard Space Flight CenterSolar flares "“ they're big and they're fast. They can knock out a satellite or create a beautiful aurora. And the jury is still out on what causes these explosions.Flares, and the related coronal mass ejection, shoot energy, radiation, and magnetic fields out into space that can harm satellites or humans in space. Current observations aren't precise enough to determine whether the eruptions are driven by energy surging through the sun's...
Astronomers have discovered bucket loads of buckyballs in space. They used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to find the little carbon spheres throughout our Milky Way galaxy -- in the space between stars and around three dying stars. What's more, Spitzer detected buckyballs around a fourth dying star in a nearby galaxy in staggering quantities -- the equivalent in mass to about 15 of our moons.Buckyballs, also known as fullerenes, are soccer-ball-shaped molecules consisting of 60 linked carbon...
by Kitta MacPherson, Princeton UniversityFor scientists, supernovae are true superstars -- massive explosions of huge, dying stars that shine light on the shape and fate of the universe.For a brief burst of time, supernovae can radiate more energy than the sun will emit in its lifetime. With the potential energy of 25 hundred trillion trillion nuclear weapons, they can outshine entire galaxies, producing some of the biggest explosions ever seen, and helping track distances across the...
A team of European researchers have pinpointed a magnetar--an unusual type of neutron star that possesses an immensely powerful magnetic field--that was formed by a star that had at least 40 times more mass than our solar system's sun.The discovery, they say, could force scientists to rethink current theories of star evolution, and specifically, the amount of mass needed to form a black hole.According to the scientific website PhysOrg.com, "This proves for the first time that magnetars...
WASHINGTON, July 22 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has detected a hypervelocity star - a rare phenomenon moving three times faster than our sun. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO ) (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO ) The star may have been created in a cosmic misstep. A hundred million years ago, a triple-star system was traveling through the bustling center of our Milky Way galaxy when it wandered too close to...
Latest Stellar astronomy Reference Libraries
The prominent feature that allows for the existence of life on Earth is the Sun. Radiation from our closest star provides heat and energy to our planet, driving biological processes and providing the necessary conditions for liquid water to naturally exist. But our Sun is only but one star in this vast Universe. And as it turns out, most stars are quite different than the one that illuminates our day. For this reason, scientists have, for hundreds of years, attempted to study the other...
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...
Stellar Evolution -- Stellar evolution is the process of formation, life, and death of stars. It is one of the major topics of cosmogony. Star Birth and Life A star starts out as an enormous cloud of gas and dust many light-years across. Star formation begins when the cloud begins to condense under its own gravity. The processes that initiate this contraction are not fully understood. The cloud fragments fuse into stellar mass clouds known as protostars. Protostars do not emit...
Star Formation -- Star formation is the process by which gas in molecular clouds gets transformed into stars. In the current paradigm of star formation, cores of molecular clouds (regions of specially high density) became gravitationally unstable, and start to concentrate. Part of the gravitational energy lost in the process is radiated in the infrared, another part increases the temperature of the core. The accretion of material happen partially though a circumstellar disc. When...
Star Designation -- The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is the internationally recognised authority for assigning designations to stars (and other celestial bodies). Many of the star names in use today were inherited from the time before the IAU existed. Other names, mainly for variable stars (including novae and supernovae), are being added all the time. Most stars, however, have no name and are referred to, if at all, by means of catalogue numbers. This article briefly...
