Related topics: stars

Cosmic furnace seen by X-ray observatory

This burst of color shows a fascinating discovery: a galaxy cluster acting as a cosmic furnace. The cluster is heating the material within to hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius—well over 25 times hotter than the core ...

Simulations reveal galaxy clusters details

Inspired by the science fiction of the spacefaring Romulans of Star Trek, astrophysicists have used XSEDE-allocated supercomputers to develop cosmological computer simulations called RomulusC, where the 'C' stands for galaxy ...

Image: Herschel's view of the galactic centre

An odd-shaped formation of gas and dust at the centre of the Milky Way, captured by the far-infrared cameras on board ESA's Herschel space observatory. The nearly continuous strip of dense and cold clumps of material forms ...

Image: Reflection nebula NGC 1999

This spooky sight, imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, resembles fog lit by a streetlamp swirling around a curiously shaped hole – and there is some truth in that. While the 'fog' is dust and gas lit up by the ...

Magnetic fields in massive star formation cores

Studies of molecular clouds have revealed that star formation usually occurs in a two-step process. First, supersonic flows compress the clouds into dense filaments light-years long, after which gravity collapses the densest ...

First look at gravitational dance that drives stellar formation

Swirling motions in clouds of cold, dense gas have given, for the first time, an active insight into how gravity creates the compact cores from which stars form in the interstellar medium. The results will be presented today, ...

The lifetimes of massive star-forming regions

Astronomers can roughly estimate how long it takes for a new star to form: it is the time it takes for material in a gas cloud to collapse in free-fall, and is set by the mass, the size of the cloud, and gravity. Although ...

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