Stars
Two New Rocky Planets Discovered Close to the Solar System
TESS has struck paydirt again. NASA's planet-hunting spacecraft has found two new super-Earths orbiting a star only 33 light-years away.…
Astronomers Caught Betelgeuse Just Before it Started Dimming and Might Have Seen a Pressure Wave Rippling Through its Atmosphere
A couple of years ago, Betelgeuse generated much interest when it started dimming. That caught the attention of astronomers worldwide,…
Astronomers Find 116,000 New Variable Stars
What do two guys from Ohio, the GAIA mission, a worldwide network of ground-based telescopes, machine learning, and citizen scientists…
Planets in Binary Systems Could be Habitable, But They’d Form Differently
Most of the stars in the Milky Way are single stars. But between one-third and one-half of them are binary…
Astronomers Find a Star That Contains 65 Different Elements
Have you ever held a chunk of gold in your hand? Not a little piece of jewelry, but an ounce…
A Recently Discovered Double Binary System is Unstable. Stars Could Collide, Leading to a Supernova
A quadruple binary star system may reveal a common source of the supernovae we use to measure the cosmos.
A New Kind of Stellar Explosion Has Been Discovered: Micronovae
The most energetic explosions in the Universe come from stars called supernovae. These galactic bombs have the energy of about…
Slimmed Down Red Giants Had Their Mass Stolen By a Companion Star
Millions of stars that can grow up to 620 million miles in diameter, known as 'red giants,' exist in our…
Dying Star Puffs out six Smoke Rings
A red giant star is dying in an unusual way by blowing smoke rings before its eminent demise.
Planets Have Just Started to Form in This Binary System
Astronomers have watched the young binary star system SVS 13 for decades. Astronomers don't know much about how planets form…