http://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Astronomers have observed a binary star that potentially weighed 300 to 400 solar masses at birth. The present day total mass of the two stars is between 200 and 300 times that of the Sun, depending on its evolutionary stage, which possibly makes it the most massive binary star known to date. The results of this study, which was led by astronomer Hugues Sana of the University of Amsterdam and bachelor student Tayo van Boeckel, have been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters. http://phys.org/news285414717.html Space & Earth Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:52:14 EST news285414717 (Phys.org) —Supernovae were always thought to occur in two main varieties. But a team of astronomers including Carnegie's Wendy Freedman, Mark Phillips and Eric Persson is reporting the discovery of a new type of supernova called Type Iax. http://phys.org/news283520268.html Space & Earth Tue, 26 Mar 2013 12:38:42 EST news283520268 (Phys.org) —Neutron stars, the ultra-dense cores left behind after massive stars collapse, contain the densest matter known in the Universe outside of a black hole. New results from Chandra and other X-ray telescopes have provided one of the most reliable determinations yet of the relation between the radius of a neutron star and its mass. These results constrain how nuclear matter – protons and neutrons, and their constituent quarks – interact under the extreme conditions found in neutron stars. http://phys.org/news281797583.html Space & Earth Wed, 06 Mar 2013 13:06:57 EST news281797583 (Phys.org)—Gravity remains the dominant force on large astronomical scales, but when it comes to stars in young star clusters the dynamics in these crowded environments cannot be simply explained by the pull of gravity. http://phys.org/news280597632.html Space & Earth Wed, 20 Feb 2013 15:47:24 EST news280597632 (Phys.org)—Two of NASA's great observatories, the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes, have teamed up to uncover a mysterious infant star that behaves like a strobe light. http://phys.org/news279471060.html Space & Earth Thu, 07 Feb 2013 14:51:13 EST news279471060 Just-forming stars, like growing babies, are always hungry and must "feed" on huge amounts of gas and dust from dense envelopes surrounding them at birth. Now a team of astronomers including Robert Gutermuth, a University of Massachusetts Amherst expert in imaging data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, reports observing an unusual "baby" star that periodically emits infrared light bursts, suggesting it may be twins, that is, a binary star. The discovery is reported this month in Nature. http://phys.org/news278851992.html Space & Earth Thu, 31 Jan 2013 10:53:20 EST news278851992 An international team of astrophysicists has shown that planetary systems with very distant binary stars are particularly susceptible to violent disruptions, more so than if they had stellar companions with tighter orbits around them. http://phys.org/news276686194.html Space & Earth Sun, 06 Jan 2013 13:00:21 EST news276686194 (Phys.org)—Astronomers using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, have discovered dust in an unusual place—just outside the reach of a binary star system with a short 3-hour orbit. The binary consists of a white dwarf with a red dwarf companion separated by a distance slightly larger than the radius of the Sun; an extremely small stellar orbit by astronomical standards. http://phys.org/news272102602.html Space & Earth Wed, 14 Nov 2012 08:03:32 EST news272102602 (Phys.org)—Astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope have discovered a pair of stars orbiting each other at the centre of one of the most remarkable examples of a planetary nebula. The new result confirms a long-debated theory about what controls the spectacular and symmetric appearance of the material flung out into space. The results are published in the 9 November 2012 issue of the journal Science. http://phys.org/news271604107.html Space & Earth Thu, 08 Nov 2012 14:00:12 EST news271604107 J. Craig Wheeler has studied the exploding stars called supernovae for more than four decades. Now he has a new idea on the identity of the "parents" of one of the most important types of supernovae—the Type Ia, those used as "standard candles" in cosmology studies that led to the discovery of dark energy, the mysterious force causing the universe's expansion to speed up.  http://phys.org/news270464601.html Space & Earth Fri, 26 Oct 2012 10:50:01 EST news270464601 The research group from the University of Tokyo and Keio University discovered that a Type Ia supernova occurs after its companion star evolves into a faint helium white dwarf in many cases, given the fact that the white dwarf is spinning in the progenitor system. http://phys.org/news265994573.html Space & Earth Tue, 04 Sep 2012 16:23:05 EST news265994573 (Phys.org)—A team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has spotted sugar molecules in the gas surrounding a young Sun-like star. This is the first time sugar been found in space around such a star, and the discovery shows that the building blocks of life are in the right place, at the right time, to be included in planets forming around the star. http://phys.org/news265442395.html Space & Earth Wed, 29 Aug 2012 07:00:02 EST news265442395 NASA's Kepler mission has found the first multi-planet solar system orbiting a binary star, characterized in large part by University of Texas at Austin astronomers using two telescopes at the university's McDonald Observatory in West Texas. The finding, which proves that whole planetary systems can form in a disk around a binary star, is published in the August 28 issue of the journal Science. http://phys.org/news265374281.html Space & Earth Tue, 28 Aug 2012 18:30:02 EST news265374281 Why stop at the dark side of the moon to make music when you can look thousands of light years into space? That's what a team of Georgia Tech researchers have done, using data from two stars in our galaxy to create sounds for a national recording artist. http://phys.org/news258715475.html Technology Tue, 12 Jun 2012 10:24:54 EST news258715475 The study of the "Demon star", Algol, made by a research group of the University of Helsinki, Finland, has received both scientific and public attention. The period of the brightness variation of this eclipsing binary star has been connected to good prognoses three millennia ago. This result has raised a lot of discussion and the news has spread widely in the Internet. http://phys.org/news256384170.html Space & Earth Wed, 16 May 2012 10:50:58 EST news256384170 (Phys.org) -- Algol, aka the Demon Star, is actually a binary star in the Perseus constellation, and has been the subject of speculation for hundreds of years. Now a group of Finnish researchers propose that the peculiar behavior of Algol was first noted by the Egyptians some 3200 years ago. They suggest, as they describe in their paper uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, that a document known as the Cairo Calendar, shows that not only did the Egyptians know about Algol, but that their observations can be used to further explain the erratic behavior of the binary seen today. http://phys.org/news255163007.html Space & Earth Wed, 02 May 2012 07:37:18 EST news255163007 (PhysOrg.com) -- To find a binary star system, which is where two stars are in close proximity to one another, astronomers have traditionally relied on pure luck. They’d first start studying what would look like a single star, then look for a radiation signal that would provide them with more information. Such a system clearly isn’t the best approach to finding such binaries, so a group of researchers have turned the tables around so to speak, as they describe in their paper published in Science, and have found a binary by first finding its gamma-ray signal and then tracing it back to its origin. http://phys.org/news245659968.html Space & Earth Fri, 13 Jan 2012 06:53:02 EST news245659968 Using data from NASA’s Kepler Mission, astronomers announced the discovery of two new transiting “circumbinary” planet systems -- planets that orbit two stars. This work establishes that such “two sun” planets are not rare exceptions, but are in fact common with many millions existing in our Galaxy. The work is published today in the journal Nature and presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, TX. http://phys.org/news245503353.html Space & Earth Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:00:01 EST news245503353 (PhysOrg.com) -- An otherwise nondescript binary star system in the Whirlpool Galaxy has brought astronomers tantalizingly close to their goal of observing a star just before it goes supernova. http://phys.org/news241885570.html Space & Earth Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:26:39 EST news241885570 A team of researchers from four Japanese universities (Kobe, Saitama, Osaka, and Tokyo) has been able to delineate the intricate structure of the circumbinary disk that surrounds a young binary star system from the observation with the Subaru Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope. By using different wavelengths to examine the system's internal structure, they succeeded in demonstrating a distinct color difference between its northern and southern portions. The researchers are now prepared to apply their approach of combining optical and near-infrared observations to other regions of binary formation. http://phys.org/news227871647.html Space & Earth Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:41:30 EST news227871647 (PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers from Wales and the Netherlands, in collaboration with five schools, have used eight telescopes simultaneously to study the strange behaviour of an X-ray binary star system.  Results were presented by postgraduate student Fraser Lewis at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, Wales, on Monday 18th April. http://phys.org/news222524365.html Space & Earth Wed, 20 Apr 2011 13:19:51 EST news222524365 (PhysOrg.com) -- A sky with two suns is a favourite image for science fiction films, but how would a binary star system affect life evolving on an orbiting planet? http://phys.org/news222444594.html Space & Earth Tue, 19 Apr 2011 15:10:15 EST news222444594 Astronomers at The University of Warwick and the University of Sheffield have helped discover an unusual star system which looks like, and may even once have behaved like, a game of snooker. http://phys.org/news208518325.html Space & Earth Tue, 09 Nov 2010 09:46:06 EST news208518325 Astronomers have discovered a planetary system consisting of at least two Jupiter-like planets orbiting pair of binary stars. The findings provide new information about the formation and evolution of planetary systems and can help astrobiologists understand where in the Universe to search for habitable worlds. http://phys.org/news207300777.html Space & Earth Tue, 26 Oct 2010 08:33:22 EST news207300777 Scientists have yet to discover what caused the strange spiral structure. http://phys.org/news205511769.html Space & Earth Tue, 05 Oct 2010 16:10:01 EST news205511769 (PhysOrg.com) -- This image shows the symbiotic system known as CH Cyg, located only about 800 light years from Earth. The large image shows an optical view of CH Cyg, using the Digitized Sky Survey, and the inset shows a composite image containing Chandra X-ray data in red, optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in green, and radio data from the Very Large Array (VLA) in blue. http://phys.org/news195317987.html Space & Earth Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:00:36 EST news195317987 The mysteries of the Universe and how we came to be are set to be unlocked by a technique for modelling fluids, similar to one which is becoming increasingly popular within the film industry to improve the realism of special effects. http://phys.org/news194175250.html Space & Earth Thu, 27 May 2010 10:34:54 EST news194175250 Is our Sun part of a binary star system? An unseen companion star, nicknamed 'Nemesis,' may be sending comets towards Earth. If Nemesis exists, NASA's new WISE telescope should be able to spot it. http://phys.org/news187548596.html Space & Earth Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:50:30 EST news187548596 (PhysOrg.com) -- An international team of astronomers, including Professor Tom Marsh and Dr Danny Steeghs from the University of Warwick, have shown that the two stars in the binary HM  Cancri definitely revolve around each other in a mere 5.4 minutes. This makes HM Cancri the binary star with by far the shortest known orbital period.  It is also the smallest known binary. The binary system is no larger than 8 times the diameter of the Earth which is the equivalent of no more than a quarter of the  distance from the Earth to the Moon. http://phys.org/news187288162.html Space & Earth Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:29:45 EST news187288162 (PhysOrg.com) -- Modern astronomy sometimes makes discoveries by looking in new places, the distant universe for example, using telescopes and instruments that extend the previous limits of detection. http://phys.org/news186401578.html Space & Earth Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:13:23 EST news186401578