Our Sun flies solo, chilling out in a relatively calm arm of the Milky Way galaxy and not causing much trouble for its stellar neighbors. That’s great for us, but it’s not uncommon for astronomers to find stars that orbit each other closely in an object called a binary. Binary star systems aren’t uncommon, but …
Our Sun is the reason we’re all here today. Some day it’ll go boom, but we’ll all (hopefully) be long gone, one way or another, by the time that happens. In the meantime, however, astronomers can observe the changes happening to distant stars, some of which may offer clues as to how our own star …
Studying a galaxy from the inside can be a tricky thing, but astronomers have still managed to learn a great deal about our own Milky Way. One of the things scientists think they know about our galaxy — and many other galaxies like our own — is that they revolve around a black hole. In …
With some of the most powerful imaging tools on Earth at its disposal, NASA and its scientists have captured countless lovely images of the cosmos over the years. Still, some images are undeniably better than others, and this stunning glimpse of a distant collection of star “bubbles” has to be near the top of the …
NASA’s TESS exoplanet-hunting satellite has already made some incredible discoveries in its first couple of years in service, but its latest find will definitely look familiar to sci-fi fans. The planet LTT 1445 A b is a rocky world approximately 1.4 times as large as Earth. It’s a likely baren rock with incredibly high surface …
New exoplanet discoveries have been popping up with increasing regularity in recent years thanks to technological advances that allow scientists to spot evidence of their existence from afar. Spotting a dip in the brightness of a star is one of the easiest ways to find planets, but new research shows that it’s also possible to …
Age is a relative thing. With our finite (and relatively short) lifespans, humans tend to think of anything older than 100 years as being “really old,” but when talking about astronomy, a century (or even a million years) is a drop in the bucket. So, when astronomers say they’ve discovered an incredibly old star, you …
Humans don’t yet possess the technology required to visit neighboring stars, but astronomers can still learn a great deal about them just by looking. The brightness and color of a star can reveal what stage of life it’s in, and even allow scientists to predict what will happen to the star in the future. Our …
We often think of stars as things that don’t move around much, but in some galaxies, that’s far from a universal truth. New observations made by NASA’s powerful Chandra X-Ray Observatory reveal that some stars are routinely booted out of their own host galaxies and sent flying back out into space. The researchers spotted dozens …
In the ongoing search for life outside of Earth, scientists already know that planets need to be in just the right place around their host star to support life as we know it here on Earth. The habitable zone around a star is a place where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold, allowing …
