Latest Stellar astronomy Stories

It’s very difficult to kick a star out of the galaxy. In fact, the primary mechanism that astronomers have come up with that can give a star the two-million-plus mile-per-hour kick it takes requires a close encounter with the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core. So far astronomers have found 16 of these “hypervelocity” stars. Although they are traveling fast enough to eventually escape the galaxy’s gravitational grasp, they have been discovered while they are still...

Several million young stars are vying for attention in a new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of a raucous stellar breeding ground in 30 Doradus, a star-forming complex located in the heart of the Tarantula nebula. The new image comprises one of the largest mosaics ever assembled from Hubble photos and includes observations taken by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys. NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore released the image today in...

Lawrence LeBlond for RedOrbit.com Scientists report in a new study that they have solved a long-standing mystery about how dying stars release their precious matter, compounds that are an important ingredient in the building blocks of future planets. Their discovery was made after observing the violent ends of three ‘red giants’ having their atmospheres ripped away by super winds containing dusty grains of silica, producing massive sandstorms in space. These grains were unexpectedly...

Idan Ginsburg, a graduate student in Dartmouth's Department of Physics and Astronomy, studies some of the fastest moving objects in the cosmos. When stars and their orbiting plants wander too close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, their encounter with the black hole's gravitational force can either capture them or eject them from the galaxy, like a slingshot, at millions of miles per hour. Although their origin remains a mystery and although they are...

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics researchers have determined that some planets are flying around in space at 30 million miles per hour. These hypervelocity planets are produced in the same way as the hypervelocity star that was found seven years ago traveling around the Milky Way Galaxy at 1.5 million miles per hour. "These warp-speed planets would be some of the fastest objects in our Galaxy," astrophysicist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said in...

Researchers said they have found why some orbits seen in young solar systems seem to be more popular than others. Astronomers have been puzzled as to why giant gas planets like Jupiter and Saturn appear to occupy certain regions in mature solar systems while staying clear of others. Ilaria Pascucci, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, said the final distribution of planets does not vary smoothly with distance from the star, but has clear...

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 team of researchers say they have discovered that a rare Earth element known as tellurium exists in three ancient stars that are nearly 12 billion years old. The new discovery helps support the theory that the element, along with even heavier elements in the periodic table, likely originated from a rare type of supernova. "We want to understand the evolution of tellurium — and by extension any other element — from the Big Bang to today," Anna Frebel, an assistant professor of...

A new, large mosaic from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) showcases a vast stretch of cosmic clouds bubbling with new star birth. The region -- a 1,000-square-degree chunk of our Milky Way galaxy -- is home to numerous star-forming clouds, where massive stars have blown out bubbles in the gas and dust. "Massive stars sweep up and destroy their natal clouds, but they continuously spark new stars to form along the way," said WISE Mission Scientist Dave Leisawitz of NASA...

Low in the south in the summer sky shines the constellation Scorpius and the bright, red supergiant star Antares. Many of the brightest stars in Scorpius, and hundreds of its fainter stars, are among the youngest stars found near the earth, and a new analysis of them may result in a rethinking of both their ages and the ages of other groups of stars. New research by astrophysicists from the University of Rochester focused on stars in the north part of the constellation, known as Upper...