Space and astronomy news
The Milky Way can’t hold onto all of its stars. Some of them get ejected into intergalactic space and spend their lives on an uncertain journey. A team of astronomers took a closer look at the most massive of these runaway stars to see what they could find out how they get ejected.
Continue reading “Astronomers Find Dozens of Massive Stars Fleeing the Milky Way”
A supernova explosion is a cataclysmic explosion that marks the violent end of a massive star’s life. During the event, the star releases immense amounts of energy, often outshining the combined light from all the stars in the host galaxy for a very brief period of time. The explosion produces heavy elements and spreads them out among the stars to contribute to the formation of new stars and planets. The closest supernova in recent years occurred in the Large Magellanic Cloud in 1987 (SN1987A) and now, a team of astronomers have searched through mountains of data to see if they can detect gravitational waves from the remnant.
Continue reading “Astronomers are Hoping to Detect Gravitational Waves Coming from Supernova 1987A”
We live in an age of exoplanet discovery. One thing we’ve learned is not to be surprised by the kinds of exoplanets we keep discovering. We’ve discovered planets where it might rain glass or even iron, planets that are the rocky core remnants of gas giants stripped of their atmospheres, and drifting rogue planets untethered to any star.
Continue reading “This is a First. An Exoplanet in a Polar Circumbinary Disc Surrounding Two Stars.”
What’s going on with Betelgeuse? In recent years it’s generated a lot of headlines as its luminosity has shifted dramatically several times. The red supergiant brightened by almost 50% earlier this year, triggering speculation that it may go supernova.
But new research suggests there’s something completely different happening with Betelgeuse that has nothing to do with its recent fluctuations. It may have consumed a smaller companion star.
Continue reading “Did Betelgeuse Consume a Smaller Star?”
According to new research we can start writing the eulogy for four exoplanets around a Sun-like star about 57 light years away. But there’s no hurry; we have about one billion years before the star becomes a red giant and starts to destroy them.
Continue reading “Three Planets Around this Sunlike Star are Doomed. Doomed!”
Despite the fact that we’ve discovered thousands of them, exoplanets are hard to find. And some types are harder to find than others. Naturally, some of the hardest ones to find are the ones we most want to find. What can we do?
Keep working on it, and that’s what a trio of Chinese scientists are doing.
Continue reading “What’s the Best Way to Find Planets in the Habitable Zone?”
As planet-hunting scientists find more and more planets, they’ve encountered some puzzles. One of them concerns the lack of Neptune-size worlds orbiting close to their stars. Astronomers think that these planets aren’t massive enough to retain their atmospheres in the face of their stars’ powerful radiation, which strips it away.
But at least one of these planets has retained its atmosphere. How?
Continue reading “An Exo-Neptune Beat the Odds and Kept its Atmosphere”
Earth is our only example of a habitable planet, so it makes sense to search for Earth-size worlds when we’re hunting for potentially-habitable exoplanets. When astronomers found seven of them orbiting a red dwarf star in the TRAPPIST-1 system, people wondered if Earth-size planets are more common around red dwarfs than Sun-like stars.
But are they? Maybe not.
Continue reading “Do Red Dwarfs or Sunlike Stars Have More Earth-Sized Worlds?”
In 1840 an unassuming star in the Southern Hemisphere brightened suddenly. What had been a 5th magnitude star became so bright by 1843 that it was the second brightest star in the sky. The star, known as Eta Carinae, had been known to vary in brightness before, but this change was so sudden and so dramatic that it became known as the Great Eruption.
Continue reading “What Caused Eta Carinae’s 1840 “Great Eruption?””
If you take a Universe worth of hydrogen and helium, and let it stew for about 13 billion years, you get us. We are the descendants of the primeval elements. We are the cast-off dust of the first stars, and many generations of stars after that. So our search for the first stars of the cosmos is a search for our own history. While we haven’t captured the light of those first stars, some of their direct children may be in our own galaxy.
Continue reading “We Can't See the First Stars Yet, but We Can See Their Direct Descendants”