Stars, as physical systems, are self-gravitating, approximately hydrostatic spheres of plasma in which energy is generated predominantly by thermonuclear fusion in their cores and transported outward by radiation and/or convection. Their structure is governed by the equations of stellar structure, balancing gravity, gas and radiation pressure, and energy transport. Stellar properties such as mass, composition, and rotation determine their internal stratification, nucleosynthetic pathways, luminosity, temperature, and evolutionary tracks. Stars interact with their environments via radiation, stellar winds, and mass loss, and they serve as fundamental sites of element synthesis and key components of galactic and cosmological structure.
Researchers using two of humanity's most powerful observatories—NASA's James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes—have definitively shown that Terzan 5 is not a globular star cluster, as it was once classified, offering new insight ...
Astronomy
Jun 16, 2026
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Once charted as a 'guest star' in ancient China, dreaded as a harbinger of ill omens in medieval Europe, and preserved in the narratives and artworks of Indigenous cultures, these cosmic spectacles are now known as core-collapse ...
Astronomy
Jun 12, 2026
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There's a question at the heart of SETI that doesn't get nearly enough attention. It isn't whether aliens exist, and it isn't whether we have the technology to detect them. It's a far more practical problem: With a billion ...
Astrobiology
Jun 10, 2026
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We don't know whether theorized primordial black holes (PBH) are real. If they are, they formed in the very early universe, when physics was much different. They had no stellar progenitors and were created by the direct collapse ...
Astronomy
Jun 8, 2026
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Astronomers have investigated a puzzling binary star system in which two stars that may have formed together now show dramatically different chemical compositions. The new study, uploaded to the arXiv preprint server on May ...
The physics of neutron stars are almost too fantastic to believe: something the weight of two suns compacted to a sphere the size of a city. Each teaspoon of its material would weigh billions of tons. If you've done any reading ...
Astronomy
Jun 2, 2026
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Supermassive black holes are the largest known black holes in the universe, sitting at the center of most large galaxies. They are sometimes described as cosmic monsters because they feed on surrounding gas and dust when ...
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is poised to make a major leap in the hunt for worlds outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. Scientists expect the mission to reveal around 100,000 worlds—a staggering leap ...
Astronomy
May 28, 2026
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An international team of researchers has developed new stellar and supernova models to explain the mysterious elemental abundance patterns left by billions of supernova explosions around the Perseus constellation, which have ...
Astronomy
May 14, 2026
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If you've ever taken an introductory astronomy class, you've probably seen the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram. This graph maps out the life cycle of stars by plotting their temperature against their luminosity, and has ...
Astronomy
May 12, 2026
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