Space and astronomy news
Older stars should slow down, but new observations reveal that they have just as much of a spring in their step as their younger cousins. Astronomers suspect that complex interactions with the star’s magnetic field might be to blame.
Continue reading “Older Stars Rotate Faster Than Expected”
Planetary nebulae are the most beautiful objects in the night sky. Their gossamer shells of gas are otherworldly and evocative. They captivate the eye, and viewers need no scientific knowledge to get drawn in.
How are they created, and why do they look so beautiful?
Continue reading “Why do Planetary Nebulae Look the Way They Do?”
Like other spiral galaxies, the Milky Way has a bulging sphere of stars in its center. It’s called “The Bulge,” and it’s roughly 10,000 light-years in radius. Astronomers have debated the bulge’s origins, with some research showing that multiple episodes of star formation created it.
But a new survey with the NOIRLab’s Dark Energy Camera suggests that one single epic burst of star formation created the bulge over 10 billion years ago.
Continue reading “The Spherical Structure at the Core of the Milky Way Formed in a Single Burst of Star Formation”
Star’s can be full of surprises; some of them nasty. While our own Sun appears pretty placid, science has shown us that’s not the case. Coronal mass ejections and solar flares are the Sun’s angry side.
And the Sun has only a mild case of the flares, compared to some other stars.
Continue reading “Just How Bad are Superflares to a Planet’s Habitability?”
Dark matter makes up the vast majority of matter in the universe, but we can’t see it. At least, not directly. Whatever the dark matter is, it must interact with everything else in the universe through gravity, and astronomers have found that if too much dark matter collects inside of red giant stars, it can potentially cut their lifetimes in half.
Continue reading “If dark matter is a particle, it should get inside red giant stars and change the way they behave”
The Search for Life can be a lot messier than it sounds. The three words make a nice, tidy title, but what it entails is extraordinarily difficult. How, in this vast galaxy, can we find life and the planets or moons that might host it? We’re barely at the point of either discovering or ruling out other life in our own Solar System.
Finding it somewhere else in the galaxy, even in our own interstellar neighbourhood, is a task so daunting it can be hard to comprehend.
So any time scientists think they’ve found something that can give them an edge in their near-impossible task, it deserves to be talked about.
Continue reading “Searching for Phosphorus in Other Stars”
Whatever we grow up with, we think of as normal. Our single solitary yellow star seems normal to us, with planets orbiting on the same, aligned ecliptic. But most stars aren’t alone; most are in binary relationships. And some are in triple-star systems.
And the planet-forming disks around those three-star systems can exhibit some misshapen orbits.
Continue reading “The Strange, Misshapen Orbits of Planet-Forming Disks in a Triple-Star System”
A supernova is a powerful event. For a brief moment in time, a star shines as bright as a galaxy, ripping itself apart in a last, desperate attempt to fight against its gravity. While we see supernovae as rare and wondrous things, they are quite common. Based on observations of isotopes in our galaxy, we know that about twenty supernovae occur in the Milky Way every thousand years. These brilliant cosmic flashes fill the universe with heavy elements, and their remnant dust makes up almost everything we see around us. But supernovae won’t keep happening forever. At some point in the far future, the universe will see the last supernova.
Continue reading “The Last Supernovae”
In astronomy, the sharpness of your image depends upon the size of your telescope. When Galileo and others began to view the heavens with telescopes centuries ago, it changed our understanding of the cosmos. Objects such as planets, seen as points of light with the naked eye, could now be seen as orbs with surface features. But even under these early telescopes, stars still appeared as a point of light. While Galileo could see Jupiter or Saturn’s size, he had no way to know the size of a star.
Continue reading “Gamma-Ray Telescopes Can Measure the Diameters of Other Stars”
Sunspots are common on our Sun. These darker patches are cooler than their surroundings, and they’re caused by spikes in magnetic flux that inhibit convection. Without convection, those areas cool and darken.
Lots of other stars have sunspots, too. But Red Giants (RGs) don’t. Or so astronomers thought.
A new study shows that some RGs do have spots, and that they rotate faster than thought.
Continue reading “1 in 10 Red Giants are Covered in Spots, and They Rotate Surprisingly Quickly”