Explainer: Light-years and units for the stars

"Space is Big. Really Big." The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pretty much nailed space with those five words. And space is so really big that our earthly measures of distance struggle.

Hubble finds source of Magellanic Stream

(Phys.org) —Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have solved the 40-year-old mystery of the origin of the Magellanic Stream, a long ribbon of gas stretching nearly halfway around the Milky Way. New Hubble ...

Super-freezer supernova 1987A is a dust factory

(Phys.org) —Surprisingly low temperatures detected in the remnant of the supernova 1987A may explain the mystery of why space is so abundant with dust grains and molecules. The results will be presented by Dr Mikako Matsuura ...

Hubble sees the remains of a star gone supernova

(Phys.org) —These delicate wisps of gas make up an object known as SNR B0519-69.0, or SNR 0519 for short. The thin, blood-red shells are actually the remnants from when an unstable progenitor star exploded violently as ...

Researchers at IceCube detect record energy neutrinos

(Phys.org) —Researchers at the Antarctic research station IceCube are reporting that they've detected the highest ever energy neutrinos ever observed. In their paper they've uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, the team ...

Candidate most massive binary star identified

Astronomers have observed a binary star that potentially weighed 300 to 400 solar masses at birth. The present day total mass of the two stars is between 200 and 300 times that of the Sun, depending on its evolutionary stage, ...

NGC 602: Taken under the 'wing' of the small magellanic cloud

(Phys.org) —The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is one of the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbors. Even though it is a small, or so-called dwarf galaxy, the SMC is so bright that it is visible to the unaided eye from the ...

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