Stars
Planets Form in Just a Few Hundred Thousand Years
Astronomers like to observe young planets forming in circumstellar debris disks, the rotating rings of material around young stars. But…
Antares is a supergiant star that would fill the Solar System beyond Mars, but its atmosphere is 12 times bigger than that
Antares, the angry red eye of the constellation Taurus the bull, is a red supergiant star near the end of…
New Horizons is so Far From Earth That the Positions of the Stars Look a Little Different From its Perspective
From its current position in the Kuiper Belt, the New Horizons spacecraft recently conducted a parallax experiment that is not…
This is a Binary Star in the Process of Formation
About 460 light years away lies the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex. It's a molecular cloud—an active star-forming region—and it's one…
It Should Be Easiest to Search for Young Earth-like Planets When They’re Completely Covered in Magma
How did Earth evolve from an ocean of magma to the vibrant, life-supporting, blue jewel it is now? In its…
At the Heart of the Milky Way, Stars Come Close to Each Other All the Time
A new study provides new estimates on how often stars near the center of our galaxy experience "close encounters," which…
Much of the Lithium Here on Earth Came from Exploding White Dwarf Stars
The Big Bang produced the Universe's hydrogen, helium, and a little lithium. Since then, it's been up to stars (for…
Huge Stars Can Destroy Nearby Planetary Disks
Westerlund 2 is a star cluster about 20,000 light years away. It's young—only about one or two million years old—and…
A New Kind of Supernova Explosion has been Discovered: Fast Blue Optical Transients
For the child inside all of us space-enthusiasts, there might be nothing better than discovering a new type of explosion.…
TESS is Also Helping Astronomers Study Bizarre Pulsating Stars
NASA's TESS, or Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite has one main job: finding exoplanets. But it's also helping astronomers study a…