Sunspots are common on our Sun. These darker patches are cooler than their surroundings, and they're caused by spikes in…
In the beginning, the big bang created three elements: hydrogen, helium, and lithium. But it only produced a trace of…
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…
The Big Bang produced the Universe's hydrogen, helium, and a little lithium. Since then, it's been up to stars (for…
Modern humans—or Homo Sapiens—have only been around for about 250,000 years. That's only the blink of an eye in cosmological…
It's easy to run out of superlatives and adjectives when your puny human language is trying to describe humongously-energetic events…
A nova is a dramatic episode in the life of a binary pair of stars. It's an explosion of bright…
Astronomers have found a white dwarf that was once two white dwarfs. The pair of stars merged into one about…
Some stars die a beautiful death, ejecting their outer layers of gas into space, then lighting it all up with…
Stars live and die on epic time scales. Tens of millions of years, hundreds of millions of years, even billions…