Tag Archive for 'Star'

Gaia’s all-sky view of our Milky Way Galaxy and neighboring galaxies, based on measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars. Brighter regions indicate denser concentrations of especially bright stars, while darker regions correspond to patches of the sky where fewer bright stars are observed. The color representation is obtained by combining the total amount of light with the amount of blue and red light recorded by Gaia in each patch of the sky. The bright horizontal structure that dominates the image is the Galactic plane, the flattened disc that hosts most of the stars in our home Galaxy. In the middle of the image, the Galactic center appears vivid and teeming with stars. Darker regions across the Galactic plane correspond to foreground clouds of interstellar gas and dust, which absorb the light of stars located further away, behind the clouds. Many of these conceal stellar nurseries where new generations of stars are being born. Sprinkled across the image are also many globular and open clusters -- groupings of stars held together by their mutual gravity, as well as entire galaxies beyond our own. The two bright objects in the lower right of the image are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. In small areas of the image where no color information was available -- to the lower left of the Galactic center, to the upper left of the Small Magellanic Cloud, and in the top portion of the map -- an equivalent grayscale value was assigned. Image credit: ESA / Gaia / DPAC.

ESA’s Gaia Mission Releases Catalog of Nearly 1.7 Billion Stars

Apr 26, 2018 by News Staff

ESA’s Gaia mission has released the largest catalogue ever of Milky Way stars. It includes the positions on the sky for approximately 1.7 billion stars,...

Spectacular Lagoon Nebula Glows in Hubble’s 28th Birthday Photos

Apr 20, 2018 by News Staff

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit by a space shuttle on April 24, 1990. It was the first space telescope of its kind, and has...

NGC 6240. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / STScI-ESA.

Binary Supermassive Black Hole Stops Star Formation in NGC 6240

Apr 19, 2018 by News Staff

NGC 6240 is a pair of merging galaxies approximately 400 million light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. It spans 300,000 light-years and has...

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite Heads for Final Science Orbit after Successful Launch

Apr 19, 2018 by News Staff

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was delivered to space Wednesday, April 18, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that lifted off from...

This artist’s concept shows a hypothetical exoplanet around the binary star system of Kepler-35A and B. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Short-Period Double Stars Can Eject Their Planets, Study Suggests

Apr 13, 2018 by News Staff

So-called circumbinary planets — those planets that orbit around a binary star, like the fictional Tatooine from the Star Wars — can be ejected...

A snapshot of a simulation showing a binary black hole formed in the center of a globular cluster. Image credit: Northwestern Visualization / Carl Rodriguez.

Globular Star Clusters May Foster Repeated Merging of Multiple Black Holes

Apr 12, 2018 by News Staff

Stellar-mass black holes that reside in globular clusters — small regions of space, usually at the edges of a galaxy, that are packed with hundreds...

New SPHERE images are revealing the dusty disks surrounding nearby young stars in greater detail than previously achieved; they show a bizarre variety of shapes, sizes and structures, including the likely effects of planets still in the process of forming. Image credit: ESO / H. Avenhaus et al / E. Sissa et al / DARTT-S & SHINE collaborations.

ESO’s SPHERE Instrument Sees Weird and Wonderful Dusty Disks around Young Stars

Apr 11, 2018 by News Staff

A series of images from the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research (SPHERE) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile shows dusty...

Composite image of an erupting solar prominence observed by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory on August 31, 2012. Image credit: NASA / SDO / GSFC.

Gigantic Solar ‘Tornadoes’ Don’t Rotate After All

Apr 10, 2018 by News Staff

A new study indicates that solar tornadoes may have been misnamed because scientists have so far only been able to observe them using 2D images. Composite...

This image shows the nearby globular cluster NGC 6397, located at a distance of 7,800 light-years in the southern constellation Ara. Image credit: NASA / ESA / T. Brown & S. Casertano, STScI / J. Anderson, STScI.

Astronomers Make First Precise Distance Measurement to Ancient Globular Cluster

Apr 5, 2018 by News Staff

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have for the first time precisely measured the distance to one of the oldest objects in the Universe...

10,000 Stellar-Mass Black Holes Exist in Milky Way’s Central Region, Astronomers Say

Apr 5, 2018 by News Staff

Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have discovered what they believe are 12 stellar-mass black holes gathered around Sagittarius A*,...

This illustration shows a red dwarf star orbited by a hypothetical exoplanet. Red dwarfs tend to be magnetically active, displaying gigantic arcing prominences and a wealth of dark sunspots. Red dwarfs also erupt with intense flares that could strip a nearby planet’s atmosphere over time, or make the surface inhospitable to life as we know it. Image credit: NASA / ESA / STScI / G. Bacon.

Intense X-Rays Could Sterilize Potentially Habitable Exoplanets

Apr 5, 2018 by News Staff

Intense radiation from host stars could strip away the ozone layer of Earth-like exoplanets and render them uninhabitable, according to a new study presented...

This artist’s impression shows how the Milky Way Galaxy would look seen from almost edge on and from a very different perspective than we get from the Earth. The central bulge shows up as a peanut-shaped glowing ball of stars and the spiral arms and their associated dust clouds form a narrow band. Image credit: ESO / NASA / JPL-Caltech / M. Kornmesser / R. Hurt.

Milky Way Galaxy is Slowly Increasing in Size, Study Suggests

Apr 4, 2018 by News Staff

Our Milky Way Galaxy, which is approximately 100,000 light-years in diameter, may be getting even bigger, according to a study by the Instituto de Astrofísica...

Images of one of the rapidly evolving transients, from 8 days before the maximum brightness to 18 days afterwards. This outburst took place at a distance of 4 billion light years. Image credit: M. Pursiainen / University of Southampton / DES Collaboration.

Astronomers Spot 73 Unusually Fast-Evolving Stellar Explosions

Apr 4, 2018 by News Staff

A team of astronomers at the University of Southampton, UK, has found 73 rapidly evolving transients — very bright, but quick events — in a...

The infrared map constructed from the VVV survey of the inner Milky Way showing the three areas studied. Image credit: ESO / M. Rejkuba / F. Surot Madrid / E. Valenti.

Astronomers Creating First Large-Scale Age-Map of Milky Way’s Bulge

Apr 3, 2018 by News Staff

A team of European Southern Observatory (ESO) astronomers looking to better understand the formation history of our Milky Way Galaxy has started creating...

This Hubble image shows the galaxy cluster MACS J1149.5+223, whose light has taken over 5 billion years to reach us. Highlighted is the position where the Icarus star appeared -- its image magnified by a factor 2,000 by gravitational microlensing. The spiral galaxy in which the star is located can be seen three times on the sky -- multiplied by strong gravitational lensing. Image credit: NASA / ESA / S. Rodney, John Hopkins University / FrontierSN Team / T. Treu, University of California Los Angeles / P. Kelly, University of California Berkeley / GLASS Team / J. Lotz, STScI / Frontier Fields Team / M. Postman, STScI / CLASH Team / Z. Levay, STScI.

Icarus Star: Hubble Spies Most Distant Star Ever Seen

Apr 3, 2018 by News Staff

A blue supergiant star nicknamed Icarus is so far away that its light has taken 9 billion years to reach our planet. It appears to us as it did when the...

Astronomers Find Super-Earth with Mercury-Like Composition: K2-229b

Mar 28, 2018 by Natali Anderson

An international team of astronomers has discovered a planetary system containing at least three massive planets, orbiting the bright late-G/early-K-type...

Chaotic web of gas filaments and dark bubbles in a Milky Way stellar nursery. Image credit: ESA / Herschel / PACS / SPIRE / Hi-GAL Project / UNIMAP / L. Piazzo, La Sapienza - Università di Roma / E. Schisano / G. Li Causi, IAPS & INAF.

Herschel Sees Web of Gas Filaments in Nearby Star-Forming Region

Mar 28, 2018 by News Staff

A spectacular image from ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory shows an intricate network of gas filaments and dark bubbles in a massive star-forming region...

KSN 2015K’s host is the star-forming spiral galaxy 2MASX-J13315109-1044061. Image credit: Rest et al, doi: 10.1038/s41550-018-0423-2.

Kepler Captures Details of Unusual Stellar Explosion: FELT Supernova

Mar 27, 2018 by News Staff

NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has caught a kind of stellar explosion called a Fast-Evolving Luminous Transient (FELT) in the act. KSN 2015K’s host...

Astronomers Detect Radio Signals from Star-Eating Black Hole

Mar 20, 2018 by News Staff

Astronomers have detected radio echoes of a supermassive black hole feeding on a star, suggesting the black hole emits a jet of energy proportional to...

According to Meurer et al, galaxies behave as clocks, rotating once a billion years at the very outskirts of their discs. This Hubble image shows the face-on spiral galaxy Messier 101. Image credit: NASA / ESA / K. Kuntz, JHU / F. Bresolin, University of Hawaii / J. Trauger, JPL / J. Mould, NOAO / Y.-H. Chu, UIUC / STScI.

Cosmic Clocks: Galaxies Behave Like Clocks, Rotating Once Every Billion Years

Mar 15, 2018 by News Staff

An international team of astronomers from Australia, China and the United States has discovered that all galaxies rotate once every billion years, no matter...

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