Latest Wolf-Rayet star Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A team of astronomers, led by Hugues Sana of the University of Amsterdam, has observed a binary star that potentially weighed 300 to 400 times the mass of our Sun at its birth. The present day combined mass of the two stars is between 200 and 300 times the solar mass, depending on its evolutionary stage. This makes it potentially the most massive binary star discovered to date. The findings of this study have been published in...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Stars with ten times or more the mass of our Sun should not exist. They push away the gas they feed on as they grow, starving themselves for fuel. Astrophysicists have been struggling to understand how some stars are able to overcome this developmental hurdle. A group of researchers led by the University of Toronto suggests that baby stars might grow to have great mass if they are lucky enough to be born within a corral of older...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online While solar wind is a common occurrence in our Solar System, a study of a new, more fierce wind has been completed using the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton space observatory. These massive stellar winds derive from rare, giant stars which burn their nuclear fuel more rapidly than stars like the Sun, and that live for millions of years before exploding into a supernova. Massive stars lose a significant fraction of their mass...

[Watch Videos: 1 - Zooming in on Lupus 3 / 2 - Panning Over Lupus 3] Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The European Southern Observatory (ESO) released a stunning new image of a dark cloud where new stars are forming, along with a cluster of brilliant stars that have already emerged from the stellar nursery. The new image, taken with MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile, is one of the finest and clearest ever taken in visible light of...

NASA Of the three telescopes carried by NASA's Swift satellite, only one captures cosmic light at energies similar to those seen by the human eye. Although small by the standards of ground-based observatories, Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) plays a critical role in rapidly pinpointing the locations of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), the brightest explosions in the cosmos. But as the proxy to the human eye aboard Swift, the UVOT takes some amazing pictures. The Swift team is...

[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...

Watch the Video: [ Zooming in on the Seagull Nebula ] Watch the Video: [ Panning Across the Head of the Seagull Nebula ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new image taken by the European Space Observatory's La Silla Observatory shows off a stellar nursery nicknamed the Seagull Nebula. This nebula looks like the head of the seagull, and glows brightly due to the energetic radiation from a hot young star that sits at its heart. Nebulae are interstellar...

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 A progenitor of a type 1a supernova may have been found, according to findings published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Astronomers believe that type 1a supernovae are thermonuclear explosions of a white dwarf star that is part of a binary system, which is two stars that are physically close and orbit a common center of mass. The white dwarf has mass gradually given to it by its companion star, and...

[ Watch the Video ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com According to a post by the European Research Media Center, the black hole in the center of our galaxy is about to meet up with a giant gas cloud in 2013. The celestial spectacle will provide astronomers with a prime front-row seat of Sagittarius A passing by a gas cloud at only 36 light-hours, or about 24 million miles. Although the distance between the two celestial objects seems far, it is extremely close in astronomical...