Enlarge / Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth aside from the Sun. (credit: ESA, Hubble, and NASA) Modern human society has been making it ever more challenging for astronomers to get their job done. While we’ve designated radio-quiet areas and dark skies initiatives, tensions have been heightened recently by the launch of broadband-Internet satellites, […]
Enlarge / A model of the supernova exploding inside a torus of gas ejected years earlier. (credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF) One of the stranger features of our Universe is the existence of what you might call dual-core stars. Many stars exist as part of a multistar system, and in some cases, their orbits are extremely […]
Enlarge / A multi-wavelength image of the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant. (credit: Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech) Supernovae happen. We’ve witnessed enough of them that we’re pretty sure of that. Why they happen has been another issue entirely. As we’ve worked on understanding the physics that drives these immense explosions, we’ve occasionally gone through awkward periods when the […]