Our sun is a lonely star. At least half the stars in our galaxy have binary companions. This was nicely illustrated in the Star Wars movie trilogy where Luke Skywalker watched two suns set on the horizon as seen from his ...
Astronomy
Jan 17, 2025
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According to the most widely held astronomical model (the nebular hypothesis), new stars are born from massive clouds of dust and gas (aka a nebula) that experience gravitational collapse. The remaining dust and gas form ...
Astronomy
Jan 13, 2025
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In the next decade, researchers will start probing the atmosphere of planets as small as Earth and Venus orbiting nearby stars. But although these two solar system planets are similar in size and bulk density—so that some ...
Astronomy
Dec 5, 2024
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43
Astronomers are closer than ever to working out how the biggest galaxies in the cosmos grew so quickly before dying.
Astronomy
Nov 27, 2024
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Perhaps the greatest tool astronomers have is the ability to look backward in time. Since starlight takes time to reach us, astronomers can observe the history of the cosmos by capturing the light of distant galaxies.
Astronomy
Nov 4, 2024
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On an airplane, motions of the air on both small and large scales contribute to turbulence, which may result in a bumpy flight. Turbulence on a much larger scale is important to how stars form in giant molecular clouds that ...
Astronomy
Oct 30, 2024
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61
Astrophysical explosions are, to give a few examples, driven by the collapse of the iron core of a massive star (known as a core-collapse supernova), the consumption of spaghettified stellar remains by a massive black hole ...
Astronomy
Oct 29, 2024
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98
Most stars form in collections, called clusters or associations, that include very massive stars. These giant stars send out large amounts of high-energy radiation, which can disrupt relatively fragile disks of dust and gas ...
Astronomy
Oct 28, 2024
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Astronomers from the University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ) in Australia and elsewhere have reinvestigated a planetary system known as HD 28185, known to contain a gaseous giant exoplanet and an outer companion, believed ...
Using the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) and various ground-based telescopes, an international team of astronomers have performed observations of a strong X-ray superflare which occurred in 2022 on a giant ...
