Clumps Around a Young Star Could Eventually Turn Into Planets Like Jupiter

By Brian Koberlein - July 28, 2023 12:29 PM UTC | Exoplanets
New images from the European Southern Observatory show a young star surrounded by dusty clumps that could collapse and create giant planets like Jupiter. The star is V960 Mon, located about 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros. The star brightened suddenly in 2014, leading astronomers to conclude it's assembling spiral arms in its protoplanetary disk. The new observations show that these arms are fragmenting into clumps, with masses similar to giant planets.
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A Gamma Ray Burst Lasted So Long it Triggered a Satellite Twice

By Brian Koberlein - July 26, 2023 04:39 PM UTC | Extragalactic
amma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the Universe, briefly outshining all the stars in their galaxy combined. They typically last for just seconds or a few minutes at the most. In 2022, an ultra-long gamma-ray burst exploded in the sky, lasting so long, with two separate blasts of radiation that it triggered the Fermi Gamma-Ray Burst Monitor twice. The blast was clocked at almost 1000 seconds, with a double blast that made some astronomers wonder if it was due to a gravitational lens.
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Astronomers Have a New Trick to Work out the Age of Stars

By Brian Koberlein - July 25, 2023 12:11 PM UTC | Stars
Determining the age of a star is surprisingly tricky and has wide error bars. It's only inside star clusters that you get a chance to accurately measure a star's age since they all had the exact origin and age. But a new technique hopes to discover the age of stars by measuring their rotation. As stars get older, their rotation rate slows down. By plotting the rotation rates of stars in clusters against their known ages, they can apply it to individual stars which aren't in clusters.
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