Browsing: Star

If you look at this picture, you will probably see what can only be described as an unremarkable, even faint star. But this ancient star, in the constellation of Leo (The Lion), called SDSS J102915+172927 has astrophysicists scratching their heads, searching for new answers. A team of European astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) […]

For the first time in human history we have witnessed a black hole in the act of ‘eating’ a star that just got too close. So far, astronomers have only found the aftermath of such events, and they say that seeing the black hole in the act is shedding a lot of light on ‘relativistic […]

Finding new planets is interesting an remarkable, but finding a whole new class of planets – that’s definitely something extraordinary. University of Notre Dame astronomer David Bennett described just that – a class of planets without stars or a solar system, just wandering around the galaxy all by themselves. The most likely theory is that […]

Every once in a while, the Sun gets a little hungry; in those times, it grabs on a little comet snack, and every once in a while, these ‘snacks’ are caught on tape. However, never has a comet been captured so spectacularly in its final moments as with the video released by NASA Tuesday. This […]

On the 28th of March the Swift telescope observed a peculiar gamma-ray blast in a distant corner of the visible universe, some 3.8 billion light years away, bewildered astronomers around the world. The powerful blast is theoretically caused, scientists say, by a black hole located in the center of the distant galaxy whose gravity tore […]

Astronomers usually classify stellar objects by a spectra going from hotter to cooler, using the letters O, B, A, F, G, K, and M. As observational technology progressed and a myriad of new astronomical findings were made, in the last 15 years alone two new classes  L and T emerged designed to describe ultracool brown […]

First of all, I have no idea how this rumour started, but a number of people signaled this already; the rumour sounded something like this: I was talking to my son last week (he works on Mauna Kea), and he mentioned some new observations (that will no doubt get published eventually) of “Beetlejuice”; it’s no […]

The first touchable scientific results of the Herschel infrared space observatory are spectacular indeed; not only is it showing previously hidden details of star formation, but it also shows thousands of distant galaxies “building” stars with incredible energy and covering the Milky Way in wonderfully coloured star clouds. Not only are the images spectacular by […]

It’s NASA’s second launch in just 4 days (after Endeavour), and this time it’s about the most advanced solar observatory ever built. It was first placed on a shuttle station complex and it was orbiting the Atlantic when it was rocketed into space in an unmaned rocket. The Solar Dynamics Observatory (as it was named) […]

In case you’re wondering, the biggest ‘guitar’ in our galaxy is in fact a pulsar that was nicknamed The Guitar Pulsar. It’s basically a stellar corpse that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation that just shreds interstellar gas, creating a wake of hot hydrogen shaped just like a guitar. Little is known about these remnants, […]