Category: stars

Reboots and remakes may be all the rage in Hollywood with mixed degrees of success (we don't talk about the Nightmare on Elm Street reboot ... ever), but they aren't so popular in other forms of art such as painting. However, a recent cosmic rework of one of art's most well-regarded pieces could be just as breathtaking as its original counterpart.

That's all thanks to the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which has captured a vibrant view of the Corona Australis molecular cloud, that shows the star-forming region resembling a cosmic take on Vincent Van Gogh's iconic painting The Starry Night.

The Corona Australis Molecular Cloud measures around 16 light-years in diameter is located around 430 light-years from Earth, making it one of the closest star-birthing regions to our solar system. The molecular cloud and its dark lanes of gas and dust, the raw materials for star construction, are at the left of the DECam image.

Also prominent on the left of the image is the shining nebula NGC 6729, which is a reflection nebula of the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud. That means that it is a cloud of interstellar dust that is reflecting the light of the newborn stars embedded within this molecular cloud.

NGC 6729 is composed of different elements that can be seen on the left side of the image. This includes an orange cloud that is actually the binary star system R Coronae Australis. This binary consists of a pre-main-sequence star that has gathered mass but hasn't yet triggered the fusion of hydrogen to helium in its core, and its companion, a red dwarf star. These stars orbit each other every 43 to 47 years and are incredibly bright, with their light also reflecting from nearby reflection nebulas. This light also ionizes nearby gas, creating glowing regions called emission nebulae, also part of NGC 6729.

To the top-right of the image is the globular cluster NGC 6723, nicknamed the Chandelier Cluster. Located around 29,000 light-years from Earth, NGC 6723 is thought to contain some of the oldest stars in the Milky Way.

The Chandelier Cluster contains tens of thousands to millions of stars, which aren't all ancient; within the spherically shaped globular cluster are more than a smattering of younger stars.

Astronomers and astrophotographers of all levels will be more than familiar with the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud and the Chandelier Cluster and this region as a whole.

But just as it took the artistic vision of Van Gogh to transform the night sky into a stunning painting, it has taken the observing power of the DECam, mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, to bring out the stunning beauty of this slice of the night sky.

Astronomers have spotted four dead star white dwarf stars playing a game of cosmic hide-and-seek, all four of which were hiding in the glares of red dwarf companion stars.

This marks the first detection of white dwarfs existing in double star systems in our cosmic backyard. The white dwarfs are all located within around 65 light-years of Earth, and one of them is number nine in the top 10 closest white dwarfs to the solar system.

White dwarfs are the type of stellar remnants left behind when stars around the size of the sun run out of fuel needed for nuclear fusion. This leads to their cores collapsing. The lack of fusion also means these stellar remnants cool and become dim. Thus, the light of much larger and brighter red dwarf stars is incredibly effective at hiding white dwarfs.

"Nearby isolated white dwarfs are usually easy to find, but we couldn't see these four stars directly in visible wavelengths because their red dwarf companions were drowning out their light," team leader Mairi O'Brien of the University of Warwick in the UK said in a statement. "It's a reminder that even in our own cosmic neighborhood, we can still find surprises if we look in the right way, at the right wavelengths."

Wobbles gave them away

Though astronomers have been diligently surveying our cosmic backyard for decades, white dwarfs are extremely good at remaining unseen. In fact, the only thing that gave these four hidden dead stars away? Curious "wobbles" caused in the motion of the stars they were hiding behind, like a hiding child causing a curtain to ripple.

The team followed up on these telltale clues by taking a closer look at these systems with NASA's long-serving Hubble Space Telescope. This investigation was conducted in ultraviolet light and using custom calibration to prevent flaring from the red dwarf companions from mimicking white dwarf signals.

This investigation not only revealed the four lurking white dwarfs, but also demonstrated that one of these systems, G 203-47, located just 25 light-years away, has some curious characteristics. Twenty-seven years elapsed between the initial radial wobble and the detection of this hidden dead star.

That isn't the weird thing, though. What is strange is that the red dwarf companion of this white dwarf only rotates once every 100 Earth days or so, yet it only takes about 15 days to orbit its dead star companion. This means that gravitational forces have failed to lock the red dwarf and white dwarf together, which is what happens in similar systems.

"What's fascinating is that G 203-47 shouldn't be rotating this slowly if it formed the same way as similar systems. This suggests that these binaries have had very different evolutionary histories," team member David Wilson, of the University of Colorado Boulder, said. "Some underwent violent, prolonged interactions early on that locked them tidally. Others, like G 203-47, experienced gentler, briefer encounters that left them in this unusual state."

The discovery of these white dwarfs helps researchers better understand the population numbers of the dead stars throughout the Milky Way. In fact, predictions would have suggested finding roughly four to five closely orbiting white dwarf-red dwarf pairs within around 65 light-years of our solar system, so finding four should instill a lot of confidence in our current theoretical models.

"Only about 30% of red dwarfs within 20 parsecs [65 light-years] have been systematically surveyed for hidden white dwarf companions," team member and University of Warwick researcher Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay said in the statement. "We think there could be as many as nine or 10 additional binary systems in our local stellar environment that we haven’t found yet.

"If we put more targeted effort into observing red dwarfs, perhaps we will find more surprises like this."

The team's research was published on Tues (July 14) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).

Astronomers have, for the first time, directly mapped the magnetic field surrounding an unusual "lighthouse" pulsar, revealing an invisible cosmic highway that channels particles blasted from the rapidly spinning stellar remnant.

Using NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) mission, researchers measured the magnetic field around the pulsar PSR J1101−6101 — nicknamed the "Lighthouse" — and confirmed a long-standing prediction that its high-energy particles stream along magnetic field lines extending through the Milky Way. This discovery offers a rare look at how some of the universe's most extreme objects accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light, according to a statement from the space agency.

Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars — the ultra-dense remnants left behind when massive stars explode as supernovas. Their powerful magnetic fields channel beams of radiation from their magnetic poles that sweep across space as the stars spin, much like the beam of a lighthouse.

PSR J1101−6101, which is located at the center of the Lighthouse Nebula, spins about 16 times every second and is traveling at supersonic speeds after receiving a powerful kick from the supernova that created it. As it tears through interstellar gas, it leaves behind a bright X-ray tail while producing a narrow filament that juts out almost perpendicular to its direction of travel. Astronomers had long suspected this unusual structure traced energetic electrons escaping along the Milky Way's magnetic field.

"We wanted to test that theory,"Jack Dinsmore, lead author of the study and undergraduate student at Stanford University, said in the statement. "The 'smoking gun' would come by measuring the polarization of the light, which indicates the magnetic field direction. If the magnetic field points along the filament, that confirms that the filament's particles are flowing along the field."

Unlike conventional X-ray telescopes, IXPE measures the polarization of X-rays — the preferred orientation of their electric fields — allowing scientists to reconstruct the geometry of otherwise invisible magnetic fields. Because the Lighthouse Nebula is relatively faint in X-rays, the researchers developed new analysis techniques to extract as much information as possible from the observations.

The team found that the magnetic field runs parallel to a remarkably long filament extending away from the pulsar, confirming that high-energy particles are streaming along magnetic field lines. But the observations also uncovered an unexpected twist: the field is far more orderly than scientists anticipated. The unusually strong polarization signal suggests the filament contains much less magnetic turbulence than current models predict, offering new insight into how fast-moving pulsars inject energetic particles into the surrounding galaxy.

"The striking divergence in magnetic field orientations observed between radio and X-ray wavelengths provides compelling evidence for the highly structured nature of these objects," Niccolò Bucciantini, co-author of the study from the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, said in the statement. "This marks the first clear indication that particles of different energies occupy distinct regions within the system, hinting at the presence of multiple, and potentially very different, acceleration mechanisms at work."

Their findings were published July 9 in The Astrophysical Journal.

The universe is haunted by "cosmic ghosts" called neutrinos, and new research suggests they may be the "whispers" of stars that died in supernova explosions over the course of billions of years.

The discovery is an important step forward in our understanding of the life and death of stars and how they enrich their environments with metals, elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. It could also help better understand how black holes and neutron stars are born when massive stars die.

The second most common particles in the universe, neutrinos get their spooky nickname because they are chargeless and near-massless, so phantom-like that around 100 trillion neutrinos pass through you at nearly the speed of light every second, but over your entire life only one will interact with the atoms of your body, if you're lucky.

The newly suggested connection between neutrinos and a history of supernova blasts has emerged from the first detection of a flux of neutrinos called the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background (DSNB). It was detected by one of the world's largest neutrino detectors, the Super-Kamiokande, located 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) underground in Gifu Prefecture, Japan.

"Observing the world's first indication of the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background is a deeply meaningful achievement and has been a long-cherished goal since the beginning of the Super-Kamiokande project," Hiroyuki Sekiya of the University of Tokyo said in a statement.

Stars go out with a bang but continue with a whisper

Supernovas come in a range of types, but the ones this research concerns are so-called "core-collapse supernovas." These occur when stars much more massive than the sun reach the end of nucleosynthesis in their cores. When they are no longer able to fuse elements to create metals heavier than iron, the stars become unable to produce the outward energy that for millions of years has balanced them against the inward push of gravity.

Thus, with gravity the ultimate winner of this cosmic tug of war, the star's core collapses, sending violent shockwaves rippling outward into the outer stellar layers, which are ripped away. This leaves the core as a stellar remnant, either a neutron star or a black hole, initially surrounded by an expanding shell of supernova debris.

The energy from these events is carried away by particles of light (photons) spread across the electromagnetic spectrum, but also by neutrinos. Yet, despite the fact that supernovas have been erupting every second over the course of 13 billion years or so to produce the neutrinos that accumulate as the DSNB, this ghostly signal is still faint, a whisper rather than a shout.

To "hear" these cosmic whispers, the team behind this research analysed almost 14 years of data from Super-Kamiokande in the form of Cherenkov light generated when neutrinos interact with 50,000 tons of ultrapure water.

This revealed a signal of neutrinos in line with what would be expected from the DSNB. This signal still needs to be confirmed, but it is a strong indicator of the DSNB, the first humanity has ever had.

"We are already planning on incorporating ongoing observations at Super-Kamiokande together with its successor detector, Hyper-Kamiokande, to further improve sensitivity in future collaborative studies," said team member Yosuke Ashida,of Tohoku University.

The team's results were presented on June 25, 2026, at Neutrino 2026: XXXII International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics, held at the University of California, Irvine, USA.

If the universe has one lesson for humanity, it is that everything ends. That includes stars, which too must die, albeit on timescales of billions of years. But new research suggests that when some stars die, they do not do so alone, potentially solving a long-standing mystery around a particular class of cosmic explosion called an interacting supernova.

When stars much more massive than the sun reach the ends of their lives, their cores collapse, sending shockwaves blasting out into their outer layers, triggering explosions called supernovas and leaving behind stellar remnants in the form of neutron stars or black holes. Interacting supernovas differ because the shockwave generated by these explosions crash into a pre-existing cocoon of material. The big mystery has always been: where does this cocoon of gas and dust come from?

Humanity is somewhat biased when it comes to stars; after all, the sun dominates our existence, and it is a solitary stellar body. But contrary to this, the majority of stars aren't so antisocial, existing in binary partnerships bound together by gravity. This new research suggests that these stars don't just live together; they can die together too. Understanding this dual existence could be key to solving the origins of dust shrouds in interacting supernovas.

"Our study suggests that many stars do not die alone," team member Ke-Jung Chen, of the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA), said in a statement. "Their final appearance may be shaped by a long and intimate partnership with a companion star."

How somes stars become a drain

Before stars reach the ends of their lives, they enter a relatively short-duration red giant phase. This can see them swell out to hundreds or even thousands of times their original radius.

For a binary stellar pairing, this leads to a situation called "roche lobe overflow," which basically sees the swollen-out star spilling material onto its companion. However, not all of that material is captured by the companion star, escaping to form a vast cocoon around the binary stars.

When the evolved and swollen star reaches the end of its life and "goes nova," the shockwaves ripple forward and slam into this cocoon of matter at speeds of thousands of miles per second. The kinetic energy becomes light, creating a strange and intensely bright interacting supernova.

That leaves an obvious question, however. If stellar binaries are so common, and become even more common for stars massive enough to go supernova, why aren't interacting supernovas more common?

Turns out, just like with comedy, the secret is ... timing.

Chen and colleagues ran hundreds of computer simulations of mass transfer between binary stars and discovered that the key to generating an interacting supernova is when this mass transfer occurs late in the stars' lives.

If mass transfer occurs too early, say millions of years before the final supernova blast, the team found that the material spreads far away from the binary stars, dissipating the surrounding cocoon. For the cocoon to hang around for shockwaves to strike, mass transfer has to occur just a few thousand years before the final explosive death throes of one of the binary stars.

"We found that binary stars can prepare the stage for interacting supernovas with remarkable timing," team member Sung-Han Tsai of ASIAA said. "The companion star helps create a dense cocoon around the dying star just before the explosion, providing the fuel that powers these cosmic fireworks."

The team's research shows that there are many ways for stars to die, and these explosive fates are determined by the way they lived.

The team's research was published on June 30 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Silent neutron stars at the center of supernova blast sites may actually be whispering softly, following the detection of faint radio emissions coming from one such object for the first time. The discovery raises the prospect that there could be many more pulsars in our galaxy than we thought.

When a massive star explodes as a supernova, the devastation leads to the star's core collapsing under its own gravity to form either a neutron star or a black hole. When a neutron star is formed, it is born spinning and its magnetic field is usually powerful enough to whip up charged particles and beam them away in a jet moving at close to the speed of light. This jet emits radio waves, and as the neutron star spins we see this radio jet flashing in our direction. This makes it seem like the neutron star is pulsing, hence we call it a pulsar.

Puzzlingly, not all neutron stars at the center of supernova remnants are pulsars. About a dozen discovered so far have been dead quiet in radio waves, and astronomers call these quiet neutron stars 'central compact objects', or CCOs. One possible explanation for CCOs is that their magnetic fields are too weak to produce detectable radio jets. For decades, astronomers have tuned into them, finding only radio silence  — until now.

A team led by Zhang Lei of the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences tuned into one particular CCO, named 1E 1207.4-5209 with the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. They discovered that the CCO is pulsing with radio waves after all, but very faintly, once every 424 milliseconds. This matches the known spin period of the pulsar – it's a veritable whirling dervish.

Found at the center of a supernova found 10,000 light years away within our Milky Way galaxy, 1E 1207.4-5209 has been nicknamed the "Blue Eye Pulsar" by Li Di, a professor of astronomy at Tsinghua University in China. Its name is a virtue of the fact that when the faint radio emission is combined with X-ray images that show the neutron star shining brightly, it looks like a blue eye.

The Blue Eye Pulsar has an intriguing history. The supernova that formed it exploded over 4,100 years ago. In 2015, X-ray observations noted that the pulsar had experienced a 'spin glitch', which is a small increase in rotation of a neutron star probably caused by some kind of disruption or shifting of material within the neutron star's dense interior.

Lei's team propose that this glitch either strengthened or reoriented, or both, the magnetic field of the Blue Eye Pulsar sufficiently to trigger radio emissions, or at least make feeble radio waves that were already there detectable.

Following a glitch, a neutron star's rotation rate gradually slows back down to its original rate, at which point we might expect the Blue Eye Pulsar's radio emission to switch back off. Lei's team suggests that continued monitoring of the Blue Eye Pulsar could answer this question.

If that answer is what Lei's team think it to be, then it could mean that there is a large population of very feeble pulsars that remain undetected in the galaxy. Old pulsars, which persist long after the supernova remnant they were born in has dissipated, are also fairly quiet radio emitters because they are slowing their spin rate over time. However, it is possible that we have misidentified some of these pulsars as being old when they could in fact be relatively young but softly radio emitting.

The findings may also explain why some supernova remnants seem to be missing pulsars. Key among them is the expanding cloud of debris formed from the explosion of supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Although astronomers are pretty sure there is a neutron star in the heart of the remnant based on indirect evidence, no pulsar radio emissions have yet been detected.

The detection of radio waves from the Blue Eye Pulsar was reported June 25 in Nature Astronomy.

Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe an oddball gas giant exoplanet orbiting a dead star, a white dwarf, located some 80 light-years away. This "life after death" system gives scientists a portentous vision of what the solar system may look like in around 6 billion years after the sun has exhausted the hydrogen in its core, shed its outer layers, and left behind a smoldering white dwarf stellar remnant.

Prior to the final stages of that transformation, our star will have become a red giant, swelling out to many times its original radius, swallowing the inner rocky planets including Earth but leaving the outer planets  — although changing them irrevocably. Reflecting this, the white dwarf at the heart of this research is orbited by a Jupiter-sized exoplanet, designated WD 1856 b.

As WD 1856 b orbits its dead parent star, it crosses or "transits" the face of this white dwarf, known as WD 1856+534. By observing these transits with the JWST, the team was able to measure the mass and temperature of this Jupiter-like planet while also observing the composition of its atmosphere. To their surprise, they found WD 1856 b is hotter than expected. They also discovered how this planet came to have such an unusually tight orbit around its host white dwarf star.

"We're used to looking back in time when we use telescopes, but this is the first time we have been able to look forward to what might happen to the outer planets around the remnant of a sun-like star; it's like using a time machine to peer into the distant future of our solar system," team leader Ryan MacDonald from the University of St Andrews in Scotland said in a statement. "This is just the beginning of our exploration of planets orbiting dead stars with Webb, and the search for further planets orbiting white dwarfs is ongoing.

"Our results show that stellar death is not the end  — some planets experience a vibrant and lively future after the death of their star."

The team's research was published on Wednesday (July) in the journal Nature.

Survivor planet is a real oddball

The gas giant WD 1856 b was first discovered in 2020 by NASA's exoplanet-hunting spacecraft TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and the Spitzer Space Telescope. TESS detects exoplanets using the tiny dips in starlight they cause as they transit their host stars, blocking starlight.

This was the first intact planet ever discovered closely orbiting a white dwarf. What immediately stood out about WD 1856 b was how close its orbit is to its white dwarf host. The orbit is around 2% the size of Earth's orbit around the sun and takes just 1.4 Earth days to complete.

"The planet is quite the oddball. It's about the size of Jupiter, but the white dwarf it orbits is the size of Earth, so the planet is seven times larger than its star," MacDonald said.

The planet couldn't have always been in such a close orbit to its star. If it had, it would have been obliterated when the star transformed into a red giant before shedding its puffy outer layers and leaving behind a white dwarf.

"The big question is how WD 1856 b ended up where it is today, and there are two theories," team member Christopher O'Connor of Northwestern University said. "One is that the planet was swallowed by the host star as it was dying, and managed to survive on the inside. The other is that the migration took place due to the gravitational effect of other objects in the system. The white dwarf is part of a triple star system, and the outer companion stars could have influenced WD 1856 b's orbit."

The clue that allowed the team to differentiate between these migration mechanisms was the temperature of WD 1856 b, which at 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) is about 240 degrees hotter than it would be if its only source of heat were the light from its white dwarf parent star.

With no energy available to warm the planet to these temperatures, the team reasoned that the temperature must be a residual effect of prior warming either from being engulfed by the red giant or during an inward migration. Using observations of the planet's mass of between four and 11 times that of Jupiter, the team was able to model how it would have cooled over time.

MacDonald and colleagues determined that WD 1856 b was likely heated up around 3 billion to 5.5 billion years ago. Its host star has been a white dwarf for longer than that, which means the exoplanet was safe during the star's destructive red giant phase, and moved into its tight orbit afterwards.

"As the planet moved inwards, its interactions with the strong gravity of the white dwarf will have caused it to warm up considerably, and it has been cooling ever since," O'Connor said.

The results indicate that Jupiter could move closer to the sun after the violent drama of its red giant phase and the destruction of the inner solar system. The findings also demonstrate the incredible observing power of the JWST and how the $10 billion space telescope is still discovering things no other instrument can.

"White dwarfs like WD 1856 are exceptionally dim compared to the planet-hosting stars we normally observe with the JWST," team member Victoria Boehm of Cornell University said.

"To make things even harder, the planet's transit only lasts 8 minutes, so it's very much if you blink you miss it! Capturing enough light to see WD 1856's spectrum, while also doing so quickly enough to not miss the transit, is something only Webb can do."

A huge, shining bauble of stars called Terzan 5 could be a clump of our galaxy's central bulge that hasn't been smoothed out into the mix, and has instead survived as a fossil relic leftover from the birth of the Milky Way galaxy.

"Terzan 5 may provide direct evidence that can help explain how bulges formed in galaxies throughout the universe," said Barbara Lanzoni of the University of Bologna in a statement. Lanzoni is a member of a team of astronomers, led by Bologna colleagues Giorgia Zullo and Francesco Ferraro, who tackled Terzan 5 with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Terzan 5 is a globular cluster — a huge sphere of stars with a total mass two million times greater than our sun's and a total luminosity 800,000 times greater. The problem is, Terzan 5 lies about 18,800 light-years away in the bulge of the Milky Way galaxy. This means dense lanes of intervening galactic dust block our view, significantly dimming Terzan 5's apparent brightness. That's why it wasn't discovered until 1968 by the Turkish–French–Armenian astronomer Agop Terzan.

Globular clusters tend to be ancient. They also tend to have formed all their stars in one giant burst. As such, all their stars should be the same age, 12 to 13 billion years old. Yet, a select few globular clusters show evidence of having more than one generation of stars. These include Omega Centauri, NGC 2808 and NGC 1783 in the Milky Way galaxy, as well as NGC 411 in the Small Magellanic Cloud and NGC 1696 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Several explanations have been put forward, including the possibility that they are the core remnants of dwarf galaxies that have been stripped of most of their stars by gravitational tidal forces emanating from the Milky Way. Or perhaps these clusters were simply massive enough to retain some molecular gas for future stellar generations.

When the Hubble Space Telescope took a look at Terzan 5 in 2009 and then again in 2016, it found that it too was among the ranks of weird globular clusters with two generations of stars, dating back 12.5 and 4.7 billion years. However, because it is behind so much galactic dust, not even Hubble has the clearest of views.

The JWST, however, does. Its near-infrared vision can see through the dust.

"Webb's new near-infrared observations, cross-referenced with Hubble's archival observations, have given us a much clearer picture of the history of Terzan 5," said study leader Giorgia Zullo, who is a Ph.D. student at Bologna.

The JWST detected two further generations of stars, one generation born 3.8 billion years ago and another 2.5 billion years ago. Four generations of stars is hard to explain for any globular cluster, which is why the team think that Terzan 5 could be something more primordial: a leftover building block of the Milky Way's bulge that was never quite assimilated by our galaxy.

"For some reason, this peculiar clump of stars formed separately from the bulge and was not destroyed as the bulge itself formed," said Ferraro. "Terzan 5 is what we now call a bulge fossil fragment because it resembles the primordial clumps that contributed to the formation of the bulge."

Disk galaxies sport two main components: a relatively narrow disk formed from spiral arms, and a bulbous core called the bulge. Galactic bulges tend to be the oldest parts of galaxies, forming billions of years before the disks, at least in the Milky Way's case. The JWST is seeing this process occurring in the early universe, revealing clumpy, young galaxies, but given the great expanse of space and time that JWST is looking across, the observations of the building blocks that go into making these galaxies are still not totally clear. With Terzan 5, we could be looking at one of the building blocks of the Milky Way's bulge relatively close-up, and it could provide new insights into the birth of our galaxy.

Terzan 5 is probably not the only bulge fossil fragment either. As well as those other aforementioned globular clusters, some of which might be fossil fragments and others might be the cores of dwarf galaxies, the globular cluster Liller 1 close to the center of our galaxy shares many of Terzan 5's properties, including its high abundance of heavy elements produced by multiple generations of stars that have died either in supernova explosions.

The team are now looking to chase up another 40 or 50 globular clusters in the bulge to see if they could also be bulge fossil fragments, or whether they are just regular globular clusters.

The findings were presented at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, California which took place between June 14 and June 18. A paper describing the JWST observations has also been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Scientists have discovered that dying stars don't go down without a fight. New research suggests that when stars like the sun enter their red giant phase, they spit out blobs of plasma and receive a corresponding "kick" in the opposite direction.

Stars become red giants when the hydrogen in their cores is exhausted, and that core collapses. This results in the outer layers of the star where nuclear fusion is still occurring, puffing out and expanding the star's radius to as much as 100 times its original size. Those outer layers are eventually lost altogether, leaving behind a dense stellar remnant known as a white dwarf. The sun itself will undergo this transformation in around 5 billion years, swelling out to around the orbit of Mars and engulfing the inner rocky planets, including Earth.

California Institute of Technology researcher Jim Fuller calculated that before a star becomes a white dwarf, it will receive around 10,000 little kicks over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. The cause of these kicks is the ejection of blobs of plasma from the red giant stars.

"In this model, blobs of matter are chaotically being ejected from the surface of the bloated stars in an asymmetric fashion," Fuller said in a statement. "And every time that happens, the star gets a little kick in the opposite direction. Like Newton said, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."

The blobs of plasma will be chaotically ejected in random directions, but this will still result in an overall net push on the red giant, a phenomenon mathematicians call a "random walk." This is akin to randomly flipping a coin to decide whether to move north or south and still eventually finding yourself moved from your starting position.

Fuller determined that for a red giant, this random walk would see a movement in a random direction at a speed of around 2,200 mph (3,540 km/h). This may seem like a lot, but it pales in comparison to the kicks received by massive stars that explode as supernovas.

The lack of an explosion in the transformation of an average-sized star into a white dwarf makes these events less dramatic, but we have still seen evidence of this happening.

Caltech researcher Kareem El-Badry has previously discovered that widely separated binaries are less common in cases when one star has undergone the transformation into a white dwarf. One possible explanation is that repeated kicks during the red giant phase eventually break apart these loosely bound stellar pairs.

"If the orbital speed of the binaries is less than the kick speed, the wide binaries will become gravitationally unbound," Fuller said. Fuller's model also suggests something that astronomers are yet to see. He predicts that in some cases the kicks received by a red giant could send it pinballing toward a stellar companion, causing a massive explosion when the two collide.

Astronomers could now search the cosmos for such events, the discovery of which would help verify Fuller's model.

Fuller's results were presented at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena. The study has been submitted to the Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.