Enlarge / An artist’s impression of a neutron star getting ready to blast its neighbor with radiation. (credit: NASA) Our Sun is on its own in this galaxy, without a nearby companion orbiting with it. But binary star systems are pretty common, and our nearest neighbor appears to be a three-star system. Given how many […]
Artist’s animation of a micronova, a new type of stellar explosion. Credit: European Southern Observatory. Astronomers have discovered highly localized thermonuclear blasts coming from the surface of three white dwarf stars—unusually short-lived events they have dubbed “micronovae.” They’re similar to novas, except these blasts can burn through a tremendous amount of material in just a […]
Enlarge / Artist’s illustration of NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, set to launch in August 2022. The Psyche mission will explore a metal-rich asteroid of the same name that lies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU) Ars Technica had the rare opportunity to tour NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California this week, […]
Enlarge / Image of the AB Aurigae system, with details of the object shown at the right. (credit: NASA, ESA, Thayne Currie) On some levels, forming stars and planets is simple: They form where there’s more stuff. So, while the raw material for a star may be a diffuse cloud of gas, the distribution of […]
Enlarge / A rendering of the star V Hydrae, or V Hya for short. In its death throes, the star emitted a series of expanding rings that scientists calculated are being formed every few hundred years, per UCLA astronomer Mark Morris. (credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/S. Dagnello (NRAO/AUI/NSF)) Astronomers have caught a red giant star going through […]
Enlarge / Illustration of a swarm of smaller black holes in a gas disk rotating around the giant black hole. (credit: J. Samsing/Neils Bohr Institute) In 2019, the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration picked up a gravitational wave signal from a black hole merger that proved to be one for the record books. Dubbed “GW190521, ” it was […]
Enlarge / Illustration of a swarm regarding smaller black holes in some sort of gas disk rotating around a good giant black hole. (credit: M. Samsing/Neils Bohr Institute) Within 2019, the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration selected up a gravitational wave transmission from a black hole merging that proved to be 1 for the record books. Called “GW190521, […]
Enlarge / Artist’s impression of what an Earth-like planet might look like in a nearby star system. (credit: ESO/L. Calçada) We now know that our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, is host to at least two planets. But we’re not sure if there are any planets near Alpha Centauri, a binary system just beyond that. If […]
Enlarge / Artist’s representation of the merger of two neutron stars to form a black hole (hidden within bright bulge at center of image). The merger generates opposing, high-energy jets of material (blue) that heat up material around the stars, making it emit X-rays (reddish clouds). (credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss) Back in 2017, astronomers detected a […]
Enlarge (credit: ESO/L. Calçada) Back in 2020, astronomers discovered an unusual star system just 1,000 light years from Earth. However, two different teams disagreed on the nature of the system, which was dubbed HR 6819. One team argued that it was looking at a trinary grouping with two stars orbiting a black hole. The other […]