3D structure of iconic Ring Nebula gives ‘a brand new view of an old astronomical friend’
We are staring "right down the barrel of it, which is really quite surprising to me — we're just lucky."
The fastest-spinning ‘vampire star’ we know of is shrinking. Soon, it will explode
The fastest-spinning white dwarf ever discovered is a shrinking cosmic vampire feasting on a stellar companion. A feeding process is pushing the dead star toward an imminent supernova explosion.
Dead stars can celebrate 2 New Years every second with nearby cosmic fireworks
Celestial fireworks that erupt all year long but last a fraction of a second, fast radio bursts, may have traced them to the immediate surroundings of extreme and highly magnetic dead stars.
Puffy white dwarfs could shed light on mysterious dark matter. Here’s how.
Astronomers just took a big step toward a better understanding of white dwarfs, a discovery that could shed light on mysterious dark matter.
Star imaged in detail outside the Milky Way for the 1st time (image, video)
Astronomers have captured the first zoomed-in image of a star beyond the Milky Way. The historic image reveals a dying behemoth star wrapped in a death shroud of gas about to explode.
The tiny space rock New Horizons is headed for may have a moon
The next destination for NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is a small space rock in the Kuiper belt called MU69. Now we know it may have an even smaller moon
Bizarre supernova may be powered by hidden disc of dust and gas
A supernova that stayed bright for over three years seemed impossible, but it could be explained if the explosion is running into dense rings of dust and gas
Extreme radiation around small stars may not doom life nearby
Red and white dwarfs make nasty neighbours due to spurts of deadly radiation, but alien life could still form on planets nearby if shielded by smog or oceans
Brown dwarfs have strong magnetic fields just like real stars
Failed stars called brown dwarfs straddle the line between big planets and small stars. An observation of a magnetic field puts another tick in the star column
Low-oxygen dwarf galaxy shows us how the early universe looked
A star factory with the lowest oxygen level ever seen in such a galaxy could help us understand how the elements were distributed after the big bang