Tag: Stars

The Zwicky Transient Facility has reached an incredible milestone: It has classified over 10,000 cosmic explosions that mark the deaths of massive stars and the feeding frenzies of vampire stellar remnants. These events, called supernovas, are undoubtedly some of the most fearsome and powerful events in the universe. Since 2012, humanity has discovered almost 16,000 supernovas. The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), which began operations in 2017 using the 48-inch telescope at Palomar Observatory, is responsible for almost two-thirds of these detections. That makes it the largest and arguably most successful…

A star about 1,360 light-years away from Earth, named FU Orionis, is twice as hot as astronomers previously suspected, according to recent data from the Hubble Space Telescope. In fact, scientists believe that the region where FU Orionis’s planet-forming disk touches the star’s surface glows at around 16,000 Kelvin — three times hotter than the surface of our sun. Caltech astronomer Adolfo Carvalho and his colleagues suggest the area around the star is so surprisingly hot because a rapidly-spinning disk of material falling into the star is actually scraping against…

Astronomers have captured a “zoomed-in” image of a star outside the Milky Way for the first time. The team brought the vast red supergiant star designated WOH G64 into focus using the Very Large Telescope  Interferometer (VLTI). WOH G64 is located a staggering 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite dwarf galaxy companion of the Milky Way. Astronomers have known of the existence of this star for some time, and it has earned the nickname the “behemoth star” because it is an incredible 2,000 times the…

When the bright star Betelgeuse explodes, it will be an impressive sight. The stellar explosion, known as a supernova, will be brighter than any planet and almost as bright as the full moon. It will be visible during the day, and you could read a book to its light at midnight. It will last a few months before fading away, as all supernovas do. But it won’t be dangerous. For that, it would have to be much, much closer; Betelgeuse is roughly 650 light-years away. So are there any stars…

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered that planet-forming disks in the Orion nebula actually surround “failed stars,” or brown dwarfs. This is the first confirmation that planet-forming, flattened clouds of gas and dust called “protoplanetary disks” surround these peculiar cosmic objects. The team discovered this while using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to follow up on observations of protoplanetary disks, or “proplyds,” illuminated by ultraviolet light in the Orion Nebula. Those observations were collected by the Hubble Space Telescope. These findings could help scientists understand how…