A University of Washington astronomer is using Earth’s interstellar neighbors to learn the nature of certain stars too far away to be directly measured or observed, and the planets they may host. Current list of potentially habitable exoplanets including Kepler-61b. Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Neptune were added for scale. Image Credit: Planetary Habitability Laboratory @ [continue reading]
ESA’s XMM-Newton space telescope has helped to identify a star and a black hole that orbit each other at the dizzying rate of once every 2.4 hours, smashing the previous record by nearly an hour. Black hole-star pair orbiting at dizzying speed. Image Credit: ESA The black hole in this compact pairing, known as [continue reading]
A team of astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has taken an important step closer to finding the birth certificate of a star that’s been around for a very long time. This is an illustration of the oldest star ever found in our solar neighborhood. The aging star, cataloged as HD 140283, lies 190.1 [continue reading]
Scientists at Northumbria University have begun to unlock the mystery of why the outer edge of the Sun is much hotter than its surface for the first time. Magnetic loop structures in the corona of the Sun. A team led by Northumbria’s Dr Richard Morton, and including researchers from the University of Sheffield and [continue reading]
University of Virginia scientists associated with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III, or SDSS-III, have announced the discovery of hundreds of stars rapidly moving together in long, looping orbits around the center of our Milky Way galaxy. An artist’s impression of what the Milky Way might look like viewed from above. The small blue [continue reading]
An international team led by researchers from the University of Warwick and Oxford University is now dealing with unexpected results of an experiment with strongly heated graphite (up to 17,000 degrees Kelvin). The findings may pose a new problem for physicists working in laser-driven nuclear fusion and may also lead astrophysicists to revise our [continue reading]