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…