betelgeuse, mysteries, outer space, star

Red Supergiant Star Betelgeuse Slowly Recovers After Blowing Its Top

Analyzing data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and several other observatories, astronomers have concluded that the bright red supergiant star Betelgeuse quite literally blew its top in 2019, losing a substantial part of its visible surface and producing a gigantic Surface Mass Ejection (SME). This is something never before seen in a normal star’s behavior. ...

Troy Oakes

Betelgeuse's mass ejection.

Astronomers Model Determines How Disk Galaxies Evolve so Smoothly

Computer simulations are showing astrophysicists how massive clumps of gas within galaxies scatter some stars from their orbits, eventually creating the smooth, exponential fade in the brightness of many disk galaxies. Researchers from Iowa State University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and IBM Research have advanced studies they started nearly 10 years ago. They originally focused ...

Troy Oakes

Galaxy gas.

Electron-Eating Neon Causes Star to Collapse

An international team of researchers has found that neon inside a certain massive star can eat so many electrons in the core, a process called electron capture, that it causes the star to collapse into a neutron star and produce a supernova. The researchers were interested in studying the final fate of stars within a ...

Troy Oakes

Electron-eating neon.

Ghosts of Ancient Explosions Live on in Stars Today

When small, dense stars called white dwarfs explode, they produce bright, short-lived flares called Type Ia supernovae. These supernovae are informative cosmological markers for astronomers — for example, they were used to prove that the universe is accelerating in its expansion. White dwarfs are not all the same, ranging from half of the mass of ...

Troy Oakes

Two ancient stars.

Astronomers Find Traces of One of the First Stars

Astronomers have found the ghostly remains of one of the Universe’s first stars inside a rare, ancient star far, far away on the other side of our galaxy. ANU astronomer Dr. Thomas Nordlander said the parent of the star they discovered 35,000 light-years away in the Milky Way was about 10 times the mass of ...

Troy Oakes

Astronomers Find an Elusive Star With Origins Close to Big Bang

Astronomers have found what could be one of the universe’s oldest stars, a body almost entirely made of materials spewed from the Big Bang. The discovery of this approximately 13.5 billion-year-old tiny star means more stars with very low mass and very low metal content are likely out there — perhaps even the universe’s very ...

Troy Oakes

Study Witnesses First Moments of a Star Dying in Finest Detail

An international research team, including The Australian National University (ANU), has used the Kepler space telescope in coordination with ground-based telescopes to witness the first moments of a star dying in unprecedented detail. The astronomers witnessed the star dying a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, as part of a project that ...

Troy Oakes