Stellar Evolution

About fifty years ago, astronomers predicted what the ultimate fate of our Sun will be. According to the theory, the Sun will exhaust its hydrogen fuel billions of years from now and expand to become a Red Giant, followed by it shedding it’s outer layers and becoming a white dwarf. After a few more billion…

Enlarge / Artist’s conception in 2021 provided a close-up of Betelgeuse’s irregular surface and its giant, dynamic gas bubbles, with distant stars dotting the background. European Southern Observatory Astronomers are still making new discoveries about the red supergiant star Betelgeuse, which experienced a mysterious "dimming" a few years ago. That dimming was eventually attributed to…

Galaxy NGC3799 lies around 16 million light years from Earth. Any event observed today within that galaxy took place 16 million years ago. One such event was observed in February 2023 when a surge in brightness in the core was followed by a rapid dimming. The observations that followed revealed that the event was a…

A planetary nebula is one of the most beautiful objects in the universe. Formed from the decaying remnants of a mid-sized star like a sun, no two are alike. Cosmically ephemeral, they last for only about 10,000 years – a blink of a cosmic eye. And yet they are vitally important, as their processed elements…

Imagine yourself in a boat on a great ocean, the water stretching to the distant horizon, with the faintest hints of land just beyond that. It’s morning, just before dawn, and a dense fog has settled along the coast. As the chill grips you on your early watch, you catch out of the corner of…

Nearly 5 billion years ago a region of gas gravitationally collapsed within a vast molecular cloud. At the center of the region, the Sun began to form, while around it formed a protoplanetary disk of gas and dust out of which Earth and the other planets of the solar system would form. We know this…

I’m really not sure what to call it but a ‘dusty sneeze’ is probably as good as anything. We have known for some years that stars surround themselves with a disk of gas and dust known as the protostellar disk. The star interacts with it, occasionally discharging gas and dust regularly. Studying the magnetic fields…

For the first time, astronomers are able to accurately simulate galaxies from shortly after the big bang to today by including a realistic treatment of the effects stars have on their host galaxies. For the past few decades astronomers have simulated galaxies by mixing the basic physical ingredients — gravity, gas chemistry and the evolution…

Enlarge / Astronomers studying a powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB) may have observed a never-before-seen way to destroy a star.Int'l Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Garlick/M. Zamani When astronomers spotted a powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB) in October 2019, the most likely explanation was that it was produced by a massive dying star in a distant galaxy exploding in a…

New research from the Hubble Space Telescope and the ESO’s Very Large Telescope is dampening some of the enthusiasm in the search for life. Observations by both ‘scopes suggest that the raw materials necessary for life may be rare in solar systems centered around red dwarfs. And if the raw materials aren’t there, it may…