Measuring stellar oscillations with Kepler

The Kepler satellite is famous for its discovery of thousands of exoplanets by continuously and meticulously measuring the brightnesses of over half-a-million stars for the signatures of transiting exoplanets. Less well known ...

Image: Hubble's portrait of star's gaseous glow

Although it looks more like an entity seen through a microscope than a telescope, this rounded object, named NGC 2022, is certainly not algae or tiny, blobby jellyfish. Instead, it is a vast orb of gas in space, cast off ...

Old at heart: A solution to red giants' age paradox

Four years ago, several red giant stars were discovered to pose a paradox: even though they are built from very old stellar material, their large masses indicate a clearly younger age. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute ...

Stellar wind of old stars reveals existence of a partner

Red giants are old stars that eject gaseous material and solid particles through a stellar wind. Some red giants appeared to lose an exceptionally large amount of mass this way. However, new observations reveal that this ...

Donor star breathes life into zombie companion

ESA's Integral space observatory has witnessed a rare event: the moment that winds emitted by a swollen red giant star revived its slow-spinning companion, the core of a dead star, bringing it back to life in a flash of X-rays.

Giant bubbles on red giant star's surface

Astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope have for the first time directly observed granulation patterns on the surface of a star outside the solar system—the aging red giant π1 Gruis. This remarkable new image from ...

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