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. (Phys.org) —An international team of astronomers have reported the first scientific results from the Karoo Array Telescope (KAT-7) in South Africa, the pathfinder radio telescope for the $3 billion global Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project. http://phys.org/news287920526.html Space & Earth Thu, 16 May 2013 10:55:41 EST news287920526 (Phys.org) —NASA's Kepler space telescope has witnessed the effects of a dead star bending the light of its companion star. The findings are among the first detections of this phenomenon—a result of Einstein's theory of general relativity—in binary, or double, star systems. http://phys.org/news284310856.html Space & Earth Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:15:56 EST news284310856 (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) —A pair of newly discovered stars is the third-closest star system to the Sun, according to a paper that will be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. The duo is the closest star system discovered since 1916. The discovery was made by Kevin Luhman, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University and a researcher in Penn State's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds. http://phys.org/news282224929.html Space & Earth Mon, 11 Mar 2013 12:49:04 EST news282224929 (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 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 (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 Justin Crepp, Freimann Assistant Professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, provided the high-contrast imaging observations that confirmed the first extrasolar planet discovered in a quadruple star system. He is a co-author on a paper about the discovery, "Planet Hunters: A Transiting Circumbinary Planet in a Quadruple Star System," recently posted to the open-access arXiv.org, and submitted for publication to The Astrophysical Journal. http://phys.org/news270806825.html Space & Earth Tue, 30 Oct 2012 09:07:24 EST news270806825 (Phys.org)—European astronomers have discovered a planet with about the mass of the Earth orbiting a star in the Alpha Centauri system—the nearest to Earth. It is also the lightest exoplanet ever discovered around a star like the Sun. The planet was detected using the HARPS instrument on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile. The results will appear online in the journal Nature on 17 October 2012. http://phys.org/news269630471.html Space & Earth Tue, 16 Oct 2012 18:21:22 EST news269630471 News flash: The Milky Way galaxy just got a little weirder. Back in 2011 astronomers were amazed when NASA's Kepler spacecraft discovered a planet orbiting a double star system.  Such a world, they realized, would have double sunsets and sunrises just like the fictional planet Tatooine in the movie Star Wars.  Yet this planet was real. http://phys.org/news266751546.html Space & Earth Thu, 13 Sep 2012 10:39:20 EST news266751546 (Phys.org) -- Astronomers in Australia have reported on their findings in their paper posted on the preprint server arXiv, regarding their use of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) to study radio signals emitted from a single star system some 20 light years away. In their paper, soon to be published in the Astronomical Journal, the researchers say that the absence of signals from the studied star system was not unexpected as the odds of finding signals from intelligent beings when aiming at any given star system are not good when noting that there are billions to choose from. Despite this, they report feeling optimistic as the project proved that such technology could be used to rule out other star systems in the future. http://phys.org/news258096424.html Space & Earth Tue, 05 Jun 2012 06:27:26 EST news258096424 (Phys.org) -- A new image of Messier 55 from ESO's VISTA infrared survey telescope shows tens of thousands of stars crowded together like a swarm of bees. Besides being packed into a relatively small space, these stars are also among the oldest in the Universe. Astronomers study Messier 55 and other ancient objects like it, called globular clusters, to learn how galaxies evolve and stars age. http://phys.org/news255768073.html Space & Earth Wed, 09 May 2012 07:41:20 EST news255768073 New research predicts the criteria needed for Earth-like planets to form around a star that have one-tenth the metallicity of our Sun. If researchers find small, rocky planets orbiting stars with lower metallicity, it may challenge the presently accepted "core accretion" model of planetary formation. http://phys.org/news253268314.html Space & Earth Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:18:52 EST news253268314 (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 "Humanity's adventurous, stubborn, mad and glorious aspiration to reach the stars" is the subject of Physics World's lead feature in January. http://phys.org/news244893215.html Space & Earth Wed, 04 Jan 2012 09:53:49 EST news244893215 (PhysOrg.com) -- ESO's Very Large Telescope has picked up the fastest rotating star found so far. This massive bright young star lies in our neighbouring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, about 160 000 light-years from Earth. Astronomers think that it may have had a violent past and has been ejected from a double star system by its exploding companion. http://phys.org/news242313964.html Space & Earth Mon, 05 Dec 2011 13:26:20 EST news242313964 (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 Until recently, astronomers were highly skeptical of whether or not planets should be possible in multiple star systems. It was expected that the constantly varying gravitational force would eventually tug the planet out of orbit. But despite doubts, astronomers have found several planets in just such star systems. Recently, astronomers announced another, this time in the trinary star HD 132563. http://phys.org/news229857362.html Space & Earth Thu, 14 Jul 2011 11:10:20 EST news229857362 White dwarfs are the burned-out cores of stars like our Sun. Astronomers have discovered a pair of white dwarfs spiraling into one another at breakneck speeds. Today, these white dwarfs are so near they make a complete orbit in just 13 minutes, but they are gradually slipping closer together. About 900,000 years from now - a blink of an eye in astronomical time - they will merge and possibly explode as a supernova. By watching the stars converge, scientists will test both Einstein's theory of general relativity and the origin of some peculiar supernovae. http://phys.org/news229772739.html Space & Earth Wed, 13 Jul 2011 10:46:13 EST news229772739 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 (AP) -- Help is on the way to consumers confused by the jumble of sun protection numbers and other claims on sunscreens. http://phys.org/news227265485.html Medicine & Health Tue, 14 Jun 2011 10:18:14 EST news227265485 Researchers at the University of Warwick have found a unique feuding double white dwarf star system where each star appears to have been stripped down to just its helium. http://phys.org/news225456576.html Space & Earth Tue, 24 May 2011 11:50:03 EST news225456576 (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 (PhysOrg.com) -- Multiple stars - binaries, triplets, or perhaps more stars, that orbit each other - are unique laboratories into the interactions between stars and their early environments. http://phys.org/news222331637.html Space & Earth Mon, 18 Apr 2011 07:47:44 EST news222331637 (PhysOrg.com) -- By discovering the first double star where a pulsating Cepheid variable and another star pass in front of one another, an international team of astronomers has solved a decades-old mystery. The rare alignment of the orbits of the two stars in the double star system has allowed a measurement of the Cepheid mass with unprecedented accuracy. The new result shows that the prediction from stellar pulsation theory is spot on, while the prediction from stellar evolution theory is at odds with the new observations. http://phys.org/news209827674.html Space & Earth Wed, 24 Nov 2010 13:28:19 EST news209827674 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 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