Could there be a black hole inside the sun?

It's a classic tale of apocalyptic fiction. The sun, our precious source of heat and light, collapses into a black hole. Or perhaps a stray black hole comes along and swallows it up. The End is Nigh! If a stellar-mass black ...

Smash and grab: A heavyweight stellar champion for dying stars

Dying stars that cast off their outer envelopes to form the beautiful yet enigmatic "planetary nebulae" (PNe) have a new heavy-weight champion, the innocuously named PNe BMP1613-5406. Massive stars live fast and die young, ...

Hubble sees an aging star wave goodbye

This planetary nebula is called PK 329-02.2 and is located in the constellation of Norma in the southern sky. It is also sometimes referred to as Menzel 2, or Mz 2, named after the astronomer Donald Menzel who discovered ...

A 3-D model of stellar core collapse

(Phys.org) —What happens when massive stars collapse? One potential result is a core-collapse supernova. Astronomers can make observations of such events that tell us what is happening on the surface of a star when it explodes ...

Hubble eyes a smoldering star

(Phys.org) —This new image, snapped by NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the star HD 184738, also known as Campbell's hydrogen star. It is surrounded by plumes of reddish gas—the fiery red and orange hues are caused ...

The violent birth of neutron stars

(Phys.org) —A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics conducted the most expensive and most elaborate computer simulations so far to study the formation of neutron stars at the center of collapsing ...

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