Tagged: star

View larger. The constellation Cygnus lies within a larger star pattern known as the Summer Triangle. See the three bright stars here: Vega, Deneb and Altair? See how the pattern of the cross (Cygnus the Swan) lies inside the triangle made by those three stars?...

Neutron-star mountains For decades, astronomers have maintained that mountains on tiny, dense neutron stars would be just millimeters tall. Minuscule mountains on neutron stars are a cherished theoretical concept. Now a study has put some new, hard numbers toward the idea. Fabian Gittins at the...

The Wild Duck Cluster, also known as Messier 11, is an open star cluster in the direction of our constellation Scutum the Shield. This loose aggregation of stars lies about 6,120 light-years away. It’s quite faint; you’ll need binoculars or a telescope to see it....

The Pleiades star cluster – also known as the Seven Sisters or M45 – is visible from virtually every part of the globe. It can be seen from as far north as the North Pole, and farther south than the southernmost tip of South America....

Astronomers may have solved the mystery of Betelgeuse’s bizarre brightness drop. In the fall of 2019, Betelgeuse — one of the brightest and best-known stars in the sky — began dimming dramatically. By February 2020, it had lost about two-thirds of its normal luminosity. Betelgeuse,...

Stellar nurseries, the cauldrons of gas and dust where stars are forged, are far more diverse than astronomers first thought, according to a new, first-of-its kind survey. Astronomers at the Physics at High Angular Resolution in Nearby Galaxies (PHANGS) project have systematically charted more than...

University of Maryland researchers created the first high-resolution image of an expanding bubble of hot plasma and ionized gas where stars are born. Previous low-resolution images did not clearly show the bubble or reveal how it expanded into the surrounding gas. The researchers used data...

A massive explosion from a previously unknown source—10 times more energetic than a supernova—could be the answer to a 13-billion-year-old Milky Way mystery. Astronomers led by David Yong, Gary Da Costa and Chiaki Kobayashi from Australia’s ARC Centre of Excellence in All Sky Astrophysics in...

Astronomers studying the fast-moving jet of material ejected by a still-forming, massive young star found a major difference between that jet and those ejected by less-massive young stars. The scientists made the discovery by using the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large...

VY Canis Majoris – in the direction to our constellation Canis Major the Greater Dog – is one of the largest stars known. It’s a red hypergiant, so huge that it makes the famous giant star Betelgeuse look small by comparison. If you replaced our...