Category: Astronomy

New data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope are giving astronomers a sense of how protoplanetary disks might act as a brake to slow stellar rotation. Young stars spin very quickly, often completing a rotation in less than a day. They could spin even faster, but something is slowing them down. Spitzer gathered data on 500 young stars in the Orion Nebula. The fastest spinning stars don’t have planetary disks around then. It might be that the magnetic field of the star interacts with the planetary disk, slowing the star down.
Continue reading “Planetary Disks Slow Stellar Rotation”

A team of astronomers recently used Arizona’s Infrared-Optical Telescope Array (IOTA) of three linked telescopes to peer 4 billion years into the future, when our Sun balloons up to become a red giant star. The three instruments act as a powerful interferometer, providing a view that would only be possible with a much larger instrument. They observed several red giant stars – the eventual fate of our Sun – and discovered their surfaces to be mottled and varied, covered with enormous sunspots.
Continue reading “A Glimpse at the Future of Our Sun”

Earlier this year, astronomers watched a nova explosion blast off the surface of a white dwarf star in the system RS Ophiuchi. Located 5,000 light-years from Earth, RS Ophiuchi consists of a white dwarf and a red giant star locked in orbit – the white dwarf might actually be orbiting within the envelope of the red giant. But this nova was just the taste of what’s to come. The white dwarf is drawing material away from the red giant, and it will eventually gather enough mass to explode as a supernova.
Continue reading “Powerful Explosion is a Taste of What’s to Come”

If you want to send an interstellar probe, you’re going to chose the closest star. And that would be Proxima Centauri, located only 4.2 light years away. Since they first calculated its distance, astronomers have always assumed that Proxima Centauri was part of the Alpha Centauri triple star system. But recent calculations threw that assumption into doubt. Was its location purely a coincidence? Is Proxima Centauri flying solo through the Milky Way?
Continue reading “Is Proxima Centauri Flying Solo?”

This image, taken by ESA’s XMM-Newton observatory, shows the heart of supernova remnant RCW103. This is all that remains of a star that exploded about 2,000 years ago. Although it looks like other supernova remnants, the central neutron star spins much too slowly – 6.7 hours per revolution. A new neutron star normally spins quite rapidly, but then its powerful magnetic field slows it down. But a magnetic field couldn’t do that within 2,000 years, as astronomers have observed.
Continue reading “Young Neutron Star Won’t Act its Age”

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These four photographs of supernova remnants in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy were taken by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The youngest remnant is at the upper left (600 years old), while the oldest is at the bottom left (13,000 years old). These photos show how gas expelled by a dying star is heated to millions of degrees by shockwaves from the supernova explosion.
Continue reading “Four Supernova Remnants by Chandra”