Black hole pair born inside a dying star?

Far from earth, two black holes orbit around each other, propagating waves that bend time and space. The existence of such waves—gravitational waves—was first predicted by Albert Einstein over a century ago on the basis ...

Large water reservoirs at the dawn of stellar birth

(Phys.org)—ESA's Herschel space observatory has discovered enough water vapour to fill Earth's oceans more than 2000 times over, in a gas and dust cloud that is on the verge of collapsing into a new Sun-like star.

Zombie worlds: Five spooky planets orbiting dead stars

All stars, including the sun, have a finite lifetime. Stars shine by the process of nuclear fusion in which lighter atoms, such as hydrogen, fuse together to create heavier ones. This process releases vast quantities of energy ...

A new class of dim supernovae

The colossal stellar explosions called supernovae come in many kinds and flavours. Some of them are produced when a massive star reaches the end of its life in a sudden gravitational collapse. Astronomers have just found ...

Webb identifies tiniest free-floating brown dwarf

Brown dwarfs are sometimes called failed stars, since they form like stars through gravitational collapse, but never gain enough mass to ignite nuclear fusion. The smallest brown dwarfs can overlap in mass with giant planets. ...

A submillimeter survey of protostars

The formation of stars involves the complex interactions of many phenomena, including gravitational collapse, magnetic fields, turbulence, stellar feedback, and cloud rotation. The balance between these effects varies significantly ...

Seeking the earliest galaxies with cosmic telescopes

(Phys.org)—With a recent NSF award, UA scientists will use galaxy clusters as astronomical lenses to peer farther into the depths of space than any manmade telescope is capable of viewing - to the time when the universe's ...

page 2 from 3