Young, hot and blue: Stars in the cluster NGC 2547

(Phys.org) —This pretty sprinkling of bright blue stars is the cluster NGC 2547, a group of recently formed stars in the southern constellation of Vela (The Sail). This image was taken using the Wide Field Imager on the ...

Guide to galaxy for Earth Hour's starry, starry night

(PhysOrg.com) -- When cities turn off their lights for Earth Hour their occupants will get more than a warm and fuzzy green feeling, they will also see stars hundreds of trillions kilometres away lighting up a moonless night ...

Giant Planet Set for a Cataclysmic Show

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of Chinese astronomers have discovered a giant planet close to the exotic binary star system QS Virginis. Although dormant now, in the future the two stars will one day erupt in a violent nova outburst. ...

Retired star found with planets and debris disc

(Phys.org) —ESA's Herschel space observatory has provided the first images of a dust belt – produced by colliding comets or asteroids – orbiting a subgiant star known to host a planetary system. The team of scientists ...

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 ...

How did the Butterfly Nebula get its wings? It's complicated

Planetary nebulae form when red giant stars expel their outermost layers as they run out of helium fuel—becoming hot, dense white dwarf stars that are roughly the size of Earth. The material that was shed, enriched in carbon, ...

NASA's Kepler reaches into the stars

We are entering a golden era for "stellar physics" – a term coined to describe research about the formation, evolution, interior and the atmospheres of stars. Thanks to a partnership forged among stellar astrophysics, ...

Largest collection of anomalous white dwarfs observed by Hubble

Twenty-four unusual stars, 18 of them newly discovered, have been observed in new Hubble telescope images. The stars are white dwarfs, a common type of dead star, but they are odd because they are made of helium rather than ...

Kepler spacecraft takes pulse of distant stars

(PhysOrg.com) -- An international cadre of scientists that used data from NASA's Kepler spacecraft announced Tuesday the detection of stellar oscillations, or "starquakes," that yield new insights about the size, age and ...

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 ...

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