Tag: Stars

Using Europe’s Gaia space telescope, astronomers have identified 55 runaway stars being ejected at high speeds from a densely packed young cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way. This is the first time so many stars have been seen escaping from a single star cluster. The star cluster R136, located around 158,000 light-years away, is home to hundreds of thousands of stars and sits in a massive region of intense star formation in the LMC. It’s home to some of the biggest…

Using NASA’s exoplanet-hunting spacecraft, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), scientists have spotted a record-breaking triple-star system so tightly bound that it could fit comfortably between the sun and its closest planet, Mercury. The system, designated TIC 290061484 contains twin stars that race around each other once every 1.8 Earth days as well as a third star that orbits this pair once every 25 Earth days. This triple star system’s super-tight orbit, located just under 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the swan, makes it a record-breaker.  The previous…

In our solar system, scattered across one of Earth’s verdant mountains, six eggshell-white telescopes gaze into the deep universe. As one cohesive hive, the domed structures collect cosmic light to guide modern astronomers exploring space — and it is thanks to this hive that we now have a brilliant new perspective on the light that guided astronomers of the past: the North Star. Our visual knowledge of the current North Star (because of Earth’s axial wobble, the title passes to different stars over the eons) runs deep. Artists, old and…

A nearby star that’s similar to the sun in many ways is actually an unprecedented oddball, astronomers have discovered. The surprising star is V889 Herculis, located 115 light-years away in the constellation of Hercules. This otherwise sun-like young star spins in a way that astronomers have never seen before and could challenge our model of stellar rotation, which scientists had thought was well understood. Stars are roiling balls of superheated gas or plasma, meaning they don’t rotate like solid bodies. Instead, they display differential rotation; some layers move at different…

Astronomers have discovered ten strange dead stars, or “neutron stars,” lurking near the heart of the Milky Way. These weirdo neutron stars are also spinning, meaning they are “pulsars.” Scientists suspect the overly dense nature of this oddball globular cluster, located 18,000 light-years from Earth, could result in these rapidly spinning dead stars taking on bizarre and twisted forms. The lot, for instance, includes several “spider pulsars” that destroy stars with plasma webs and a speed demon vampire star greedily feasting on its companion stars. Pulsars are neutron stars that…