Image: Reflected starlight bathes forming star

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image captures a portion of the reflection nebula IC 2631 that contains a protostar, the hot, dense core of a forming star that is accumulating gas and dust. Eventually the protostar may gravitationally ...

Image: Hubble spies eye in the sky

Cleopatra's Eye, or NGC 1535, is a planetary nebula in the constellation Eridanus. This nebula has an unusual structure that is similar to the better-known NGC 2392, with an outer region and a brighter inner center.

Rocky exoplanets are even stranger than we thought

An astronomer from NSF's NOIRLab has teamed up with a geologist from California State University, Fresno, to make the first estimates of rock types that exist on planets orbiting nearby stars. After studying the chemical ...

Life in these star-systems could have spotted Earth

Scientists at Cornell University and the American Museum of Natural History have identified 2,034 nearby star-systems—within the small cosmic distance of 326 light-years—that could find Earth merely by watching our pale ...

Aging stars provide a new cosmological yardstick

Despite a century of measurements, astronomers can't agree on the rate at which the universe is expanding. A technique that relies on measuring distances to a specific type of aging star in other galaxies—called the J-region ...

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