Latest Stellar astronomy Stories
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A team from Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) has observed the earliest stages of star formation using the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory. The astronomers were able to produce a three-dimensional map of the molecular cloud B68, a possible birthplace for a low-mass star. They managed to also identify a previously unobserved class of object that could be the earliest known precursor of the birth of massive...
[Watch the Video: X-ray Satellites Monitor the Clashing Winds of a Colossal Binary] [Watch the Video: Simulation of Colliding Stellar Wind Binary] [Watch the Video: Simulation of Binary Star System] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Astronomers have X-rayed the stellar winds of two massive stars that are orbiting around one another. Stellar winds can trigger the collapse of surrounding clouds of gas and dust to form new stars, and can also blast the clouds...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The European Space Agency (ESA) said its Herschel space observatory found a gas and dust cloud that contains enough water vapor to fill Earth's oceans more than 2,000 times over. The new observations of a pre-stellar core--or cold, dark clouds of gas and dust--in the constellation of Taurus are the first detection of water vapor in a molecular cloud on the verge of star formation. “To produce that amount of vapor, there must be...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Listen to the podcast “How Planets Form” with redOrbit's Dr. John Millis and planet-hunting expert Dr. Eric Mamajek of the University of Rochester. The center of the Milky Way seems like the last place to form a new planet, inhospitable and violent even. Stars crowd each other, whizzing through space like cars on a rush hour freeway while supernova explosions blast out shock waves and bathe the region in intense radiation. The...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers have measured the largest-ever magnetic field around a massive star and reported their findings in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The team used the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) at The University of Texas McDonald Observatory and the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on Hawaii's Mauna Kea to determine that the star's magnetic field is 20,000 times stronger than the Sun's. The magnetic...
Watch the Video: Artist’s Impression of Glycolaldehyde Molecules | Watch the Video: Sugar Molecules Found in the Young Star Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Most would assume that sugar is an essential part of life, but did you know it is actually considered a building block? Well, astronomers have now found these sweet organic molecules around a distant star. The finding reported in the Astrophysical Journal Letters proves that the building blocks of life were...
Watch the Video: Simulation of Star Clusters Encounter Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The Hubble Space Telescope has been keeping its eyes fixed on two clusters full of massive stars that may be in the early stages of merging. The star clusters are about 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is a small satellite galaxy to our Milky Way. What was thought to have been just one cluster in the star-forming region commonly referred to as the...
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 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...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Researchers from a Japanese university have discovered intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) candidates at the center of the Milky Way, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAO) announced on Friday. Tomoharu Oka, an Associate Professor at Keio University, and colleagues used radio telescopes to locate four black hole candidates approximately 30,000 light-years from the solar system, located in the direction of the...
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...
