KPD 0005+5106: Roasted and shredded by a stellar sidekick

An exhausted star still has some punches to deliver. Astronomers have found that a white dwarf is pummeling a companion object—either a lightweight star or a planet—with incessant blasts of heat and radiation plus a relentless ...

Scientists discover fractal patterns in a quantum material

A fractal is any geometric pattern that occurs again and again, at different sizes and scales, within the same object. This "self-similarity" can be seen throughout nature, for example in a snowflake's edge, a river network, ...

Cluster and XMM-Newton pave the way for SMILE

A joint European-Chinese spacecraft, SMILE is currently scheduled for launch in 2023. It will be placed in a highly inclined, elliptical orbit around Earth, which will take it as far as 120 000 km from our planet.

In colliding galaxies, a pipsqueak shines bright

In the nearby Whirlpool galaxy and its companion galaxy, M51b, two supermassive black holes heat up and devour surrounding material. These two monsters should be the most luminous X-ray sources in sight, but a new study using ...

NuSTAR mission proves superstar Eta Carinae shoots cosmic rays

A new study using data from NASA's NuSTAR space telescope suggests that Eta Carinae, the most luminous and massive stellar system within 10,000 light-years, is accelerating particles to high energies—some of which may reach ...

page 1 from 2