The star Eta Carinae is ready to blow. 170 years ago, this 100-solar-mass object belched out several suns’ worth of gas in an eruption that made it the second-brightest star after Sirius. That was just a precursor to the main event, since it will eventually go supernova. Eta Carinae, situated about 8000 light-years away [continue reading]
Far beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto, where the Sun is a pinprick of light not much brighter than other stars, a vast swarm of icy bodies circles the Solar System. Astronomers call it the “Oort Cloud,” and it is the source of some of history’s finest comets. One of them could be [continue reading]
Nature hath no fury like a dying star – and astronomers couldn’t be happier… An international research team, led by Edo Berger of Harvard University, made the most of a dying star’s fury to probe a distant galaxy some 9.5 billion light-years distant. The dying star, which lit the galactic scene, is the [continue reading]