Related topics: star formation

Saturn's outer ring much bigger than thought

(Phys.org)—A small team of researchers with members affiliated with the University of Maryland, the University of Virginia and Caltech, has found that the outermost ring of Saturn is much bigger than had been previously ...

Milky Way's center unveils supernova 'dust factory'

Sifting through the center of the Milky Way galaxy, astronomers have made the first direct observations - using an infrared telescope aboard a modified Boeing 747 - of cosmic building-block dust resulting from an ancient ...

Image: Simulating space for JWST's four infrared instruments

Building a space telescope is no mean feat. Conditions here on Earth are drastically different from those experienced in orbit around our planet. How do we know that any telescope built in our controlled laboratories can ...

What are the biggest telescopes in the world (and space)?

When you want to watch the sky, size really matters. The more light a telescope can collect, the more information we can get about stars, galaxies, quasars, or whatever the heck else we want to take a look at.

Image: Horsehead nebula viewed in infrared

Sometimes a horse of a different color hardly seems to be a horse at all, as, for example, in this newly released image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The famous Horsehead nebula makes a ghostly appearance on the far ...

Image: Multicoloured view of supernova remnant

Most celestial events unfold over thousands of years or more, making it impossible to follow their evolution on human timescales. Supernovas are notable exceptions, the powerful stellar explosions that make stars as bright ...

Effects of accretion disks around newborn stars

Stars are born in dense, cool clouds of molecular gas and dust. When the local density is high enough, the matter can gravitationally collapse to form a new star, a so-called young stellar object (YSO). In its early phases, ...

Green light for E-ELT construction

The E-ELT will be a 39-metre aperture optical and infrared telescope sited on Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Atacama Desert, 20 kilometres from ESO's Very Large Telescope on Cerro Paranal. It will be the world's largest "eye ...

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