Behold six galactic collisions, masterfully captured by Hubble
To ring in the new year, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) dropped six captivating images of galaxies smashing into one another.
Tag: stars
The best space stories of 2020
There’s no way to sugarcoat it; 2020 has been rough. But despite the stagnation and turmoil on Earth, some researchers and organizations kept their eyes on the skies.
Stars are dying all across the galaxy—why don’t we see them?
Astronomers estimate that perhaps 50 stars have exploded in our galaxy during the last millennium—one roughly every two decades. But the 1054 supernova is one of just five stellar detonations that researchers have confidently identified in historical records, the last of which took place more than 400 years ago. So where are all the supernovae? Where are our celestial fireworks?
Aliens could be talking to us right now. This scientist is listening.
Thanks to massive radio telescopes, astronomers can pick up wide swaths of transmissions at once, making identifying extraterrestrial life a little easier.
We still don’t really know what’s inside the sun—but that could change very soon
Researchers hope to eventually discern the answer to one of astronomy’s more heated questions: what ingredients make up the sun, and by extension, all the other stars in the universe?
Meet the disk-shaped halo of hot gas you currently live in
Scientists have determined that the Milky Way’s halo has a disk-like shape and a clumpy texture that suggests it’s constantly trading gas and energy with the galaxy as stars are born and die.
Astronomers caught a black hole slurping up a star like spaghetti
When a star ventures a little too close to a black hole, the intense tidal forces suck into it like a giant noodle of star stuff in a cosmic (and much more chaotic) reenactment of that iconic scene in “Lady and the Tramp.” The black hole’s extreme gravitational pull shreds the star into thin strands of material—a process delightfully called “spaghettification.” When these noodle-like strips get sucked into the black hole, they release a powerful bright flare of energy. In September of 2019, the light from such a doomed encounter reached Earth.
A strange dusty disk could hide a planet betwixt three stars
About 1,300 light-years away, a young triple-star system is warping and splitting a disk of dust and gas where planets could one day form. Unlike the flat disk that gave rise to the planets in our own Solar System, the system’s disk consists of three misaligned rings.
A local stellar graveyard could reveal our galaxy’s beginnings
Some two billion years ago, the Milky Way scarfed down a ball of about a million stars until the gravitational pull of our galaxy tore it into a 27,000-light-year-long stellar river. Now, new research looking at the gobbled up remains of our galaxy’s snack suggest that it wasn’t born in our corner of the universe—and these unique origins could help us understand the early assembly of the Milky Way.
A lopsided pair of dead stars could reveal some of the universe’s secrets
Most binary systems include two comparably sized neutron stars locked in a fiercely tight orbit. But PSR J1913+1102 contains a pair of mismatched neutron stars — one of them a pulsar — with masses that are 1.62 and 1.27 times the mass of the Sun. That makes it “the most asymmetric merging system reported so far,” according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature detailing the system and its impending collision.