Astronomers discover helium-burning white dwarf

A white dwarf star can explode as a supernova when its mass exceeds the limit of about 1.4 solar masses. A team led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching and involving the University of ...

The messy death of a star, as observed by Webb (Update)

Around 2,500 years ago, a star ejected most of its gas, forming the beautiful Southern Ring Nebula, NGC 3132, chosen as one of the first five image packages from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Astronomers discover closest black hole to Earth

Black holes are the most extreme objects in the universe. Supermassive versions of these unimaginably dense objects likely reside at the centers of all large galaxies. Stellar-mass black holes—which weigh approximately ...

KT Eridani is a recurrent nova, study finds

By analyzing a large set of photometric data, astronomers have investigated KT Eridani—a nova detected in 2009. The study, published October 19 on arXiv.org, found that KT Eridani is a recurrent nova with a recurrence time-scale ...

Heaviest neutron star to date is a 'black widow' eating its mate

A dense, collapsed star spinning 707 times per second—making it one of the fastest spinning neutron stars in the Milky Way galaxy—has shredded and consumed nearly the entire mass of its stellar companion and, in the process, ...

The star that survived a supernova

A supernova is the catastrophic explosion of a star. Thermonuclear supernovae, in particular, signal the complete destruction of a white dwarf star, leaving nothing behind. At least that's what models and observations suggested.

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