Making a 3D map of our galaxy would be easier if some stars behaved long enough to for us to calculate the distances to them. However, red supergiants are the frisky kids on the block when it comes to pinning down their exact ...
Astronomy
Jul 1, 2022
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98
Betelgeuse keeps getting dimmer, and everyone is wondering what exactly that means. The star will go supernova at the end of its life, but that's not projected to happen for tens of thousands of years or so. So what's causing ...
Astronomy
Jan 23, 2020
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2380
Stars are not motionless in the sky: their positions change continuously as they move through our Galaxy, the Milky Way. These motions, too slow to be appreciated with the naked eye over a human lifetime, can be captured ...
Astronomy
Jun 9, 2017
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14
For almost half a century, scientists have subscribed to the theory that when a star comes to the end of its life-cycle, it will undergo a gravitational collapse. At this point, assuming enough mass is present, this collapse ...
Astronomy
Sep 16, 2016
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46
Looking west after sunset on Friday September 26, the thin waxing crescent moon forms a triangle with Mercury and Spica, the brightest star in the constellation of Virgo. You can see how far Mercury has travelled since passing ...
Space Exploration
Sep 25, 2014
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0
In 1975, Kip Thorne (BS '62, and the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus) and then-Caltech postdoctoral fellow Anna Żytkow sought the answer to an intriguing question: Would it be possible to have ...
Astronomy
Jun 30, 2014
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0
A group of researchers led by Melina Bersten (Kavli IPMU) has presented evidence that the yellow supergiant (YSG) star found at the location of supernova SN 2011dh in the famous nearby galaxy M51 was indeed the SN progenitor, ...
Astronomy
Oct 5, 2012
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0
Stars live for a long time, with even the most massive stars having lifetimes measured in millions of years. But, for a mere few thousand years towards the end of their lives, some massive stars go through what astronomers ...
Astronomy
Apr 17, 2012
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0
Observational results of the Hubble Space Telescope announced in March 2013 confirmed the theoretical prediction by the Bersten team at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe that the yellow supergiant ...
Astronomy
Apr 5, 2013
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