Space and astronomy news
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”
Ever wondered what our young Sun might have looked like in its infancy some five billion years ago?
The audacious JWST has captured an image of a very young star much like our young Sun, though the star itself is obscured. Instead, we see supersonic jets of gas. Young stars can blast out jets of material as they form, and the jets light up the surrounding gas. The luminous regions created by the jets as they slam into the gas are called Herbig-Haro Objects.
Continue reading “It’s Like Looking at the Infant Sun: Webb Captures Image of an Energetic Young Star”
Astronomers working with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory have spotted something unusual. The observatory’s X-Ray Telescope (XRT) has captured emissions from a supermassive black hole (SMBH) in a galaxy about 500 million light-years away. The black hole is repeatedly feeding on an unfortunate star that came too close.
Continue reading “A Black Hole Nibbles on a Star Every 22 Days, Slowly Consuming it”
When a black hole consumes a star, things can get quite messy. Take, for example, the event known as ASASSN-14li, where a massive star strayed too close to a supermassive black hole and paid the ultimate price.
Continue reading “A Giant Black Hole Destroyed a Star and Threw the Pieces Into Space”
Binary star systems often appear as variable stars. When we can’t see the individual stars because they are either too close together or too far away, we can see the gradual brightening and dimming of a single point of light as the stars orbit each other. Sometimes if the stars are particularly close when they pass each other they can brighten in unusual ways. One example of this is known as a heartbeat star.
Continue reading “Giant Tidal Waves are Crashing Onto the Surface of an Enormous Star”