Latest Stellar astronomy Stories
Lee Rannals (http://blogs.redorbit.com/author/rannals/) for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new image taken by the European Space Agency’s Herschel space observatory, shows off two nebulous blue orbs in the Vela C region. Vela C is one of four regions known as the Vela Molecular Ridge, which is a complex of gas and dust located 2,300 light-years from Earth and weighing about 500,000 times the mass of the sun. The image shows the interplay between gravity and turbulence in the...
A team of scientists has created an "MRI" of the Sun's interior plasma motions, shedding light on how it transfers heat from its deep interior to its surface. The result, which appears in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, upends our understanding of how heat is transported outwards by the Sun and challenges existing explanations of the formation of sunspots and magnetic field generation. The work was conducted by researchers from NYU's Courant Institute of...
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 ] redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online ESA's XMM-Newton has helped to reveal the violent behavior of a young Sun-like star spinning at high speed and spewing out super-hot plasma. Along with information from NASA’s Chandra and Japan’s Suzaku, the findings shed new light on one of the most primary issues in astronomy: the birth of stars like our own Sun. Such stars are born from clouds of gas and dust. These fall apart under gravity and...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com [ Watch the Video ] New observations show that small planets may be more widespread in our galaxy than previously thought. Lars A. Buchhave, an astrophysicist at the Niels Bohr Institute and the Centre for Star and Planet Formation at the University of Copenhagen, and colleagues studied the composition of over 150 stars harboring 226 planet candidates smaller than Neptune for the research. Scientists previously thought that the formation of small...
A key to understanding the dynamics of the sun and what causes the great solar explosions there relies on deciphering how material, heat and energy swirl across the sun's surface and rise into the upper atmosphere, or corona. Tracking the constantly moving material requires state-of-the-art telescopes with the highest resolution possible. By combining images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and a new generation telescope called the New Solar Telescope (NST) at Big Bear Solar...
Building a terrestrial planet requires raw materials that weren't available in the early history of the universe. The Big Bang filled space with hydrogen and helium. Chemical elements like silicon and oxygen - key components of rocks - had to be cooked up over time by stars. But how long did that take? How many of such heavy elements do you need to form planets? Previous studies have shown that Jupiter-sized gas giants tend to form around stars containing more heavy elements than the Sun....
WASHINGTON, June 13, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The formation of small worlds like Earth previously was thought to occur mostly around stars rich in heavy elements such as iron and silicon. However, new ground-based observations, combined with data collected by NASA's Kepler space telescope, shows small planets form around stars with a wide range of heavy element content and suggests they may be widespread in our galaxy. (Logo:...
Unfortunately, stars don't have birth certificates. So, astronomers have a tough time figuring out their ages. Knowing a star's age is critical for understanding how our Milky Way galaxy built itself up over billions of years from smaller galaxies. Jason Kalirai of the Space Telescope Science Institute and The Johns Hopkins University's Center for Astrophysical Sciences, both in Baltimore, Md., has found the next best thing to a star's birth certificate. Using a new technique, Kalirai...
Researchers working at the University of Bonn in Germany have used computer simulations to discover the first evidence that the way in which stars form depends upon the conditions of their birth environments, claims a new study published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. In a Friday statement, the Society said that the properties of stars, which are believed to form in interstellar space from gas and dust clouds, are dependent upon the surrounding conditions...
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...
