stellar evolution Archives

What Does It Mean To Be ‘Star Stuff’?

22 Dec , 2014 by Vanessa Janek

At one time or another, all science enthusiasts have heard the late Carl Sagan’s infamous words: “We are made of star stuff.” But what does that mean exactly? How could colossal balls of plasma, greedily burning away their nuclear fuel in faraway time and space, play any part in spawning the vast complexity of our Earthly world? How is it that “the nitrogen in […]

Radio Telescopes Resolve Pleiades Distance Debate

29 Aug , 2014 by Shannon Hall

Fall will soon be at our doorstep. But before the leaves change colors and the smell of pumpkin fills our coffee shops, the Pleiades star cluster will mark the new season with its earlier presence in the night sky. The delicate grouping of blue stars has been a prominent sight since antiquity. But in recent […]

Deep Astrophoto of LDN 673: The Place Where Stars are Born

4 Aug , 2014 by Nancy Atkinson

What a stunning view of this dark region of space! This image, by astrophotographer Callum Hayton shows LDN 673, a molecular cloud complex that lies in the constellation Aquila. This region is massive — around 67 trillion kilometers (42 trillion miles across), and it is between 300-600 light years from Earth. Observers in the northern […]

A Protostar’s Age Gleaned Only From Sound Waves

5 Jul , 2014 by Shannon Hall

Precisely dating a star can have important consequences for understanding stellar evolution and any circling exoplanets. But it’s one of the toughest plights in astronomy with only a few existing techniques. One method is to find a star with radioactive elements like uranium and thorium, whose half-lives are known and can be used to date […]

Astronomers Find Evidence of a Strange Type of Star

4 Jun , 2014 by Jason Major

One has never been spotted for sure in the wild jungle of strange stellar objects out there, but astronomers now think they have finally found a theoretical cosmic curiosity: a Thorne-Zytkow Object, or TZO, hiding in the neighboring Small Magellanic Cloud. With the outward appearance of garden-variety red supergiants, TZOs are actually two stars in […]

Stars Boil Before They Blow Up, Says NuSTAR

19 Feb , 2014 by Jason Major

Supernovas are some of the most energetic and powerful events in the observable Universe. Briefly outshining entire galaxies, they are the final, dying outbursts of stars several times more massive than our Sun. And while we know supernovas are responsible for creating the heavy elements necessary for everything from planets to people to power tools, […]

Is Eta Carinae Heading Toward Another Eruption?

19 Feb , 2014 by Shannon Hall

Massive stars can devastate their surroundings, unleashing hot winds and blasting radiation. With a mass over 100 times heavier than the Sun and a luminosity a million times brighter than the Sun, Eta Carinae clocks in as one of the biggest and brightest stars in our galaxy. The enigmatic object walks a thin line between […]

Dazzling New Views of a Familiar Cluster

19 Feb , 2014 by David Dickinson

Wow. It’s always amazing to get new views of familiar sky targets. And you always know that a “feast for the eyes” is in store when astronomers turn a world-class instrument towards a familiar celestial object. Such an image was released this morning from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). Astronomers turned ESO’s 2.2-metre telescope towards […]

When Is a Star Not a Star?

13 Dec , 2013 by Jason Major

When it’s a brown dwarf — but where do we draw the line? Often called “failed stars,” brown dwarfs are curious cosmic creatures. They’re kind of like swollen, super-dense Jupiters, containing huge amounts of matter yet not quite enough to begin fusing hydrogen in their cores. Still, there has to be some sort of specific […]

Nearby Ancient Star is Almost as Old as the Universe

23 Feb , 2013 by Dan Majaess

A metal-poor star located merely 190 light-years from the Sun is 14.46+-0.80 billion years old, which implies that the star is nearly as old as the Universe! Those results emerged from a new study led by Howard Bond. Such metal-poor stars are (super) important to astronomers because they set an independent lower limit for the age […]

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