Some 1,500 light years from Earth, a mystery of stellar proportions is playing out. A singular star out there captured scientists' and the public's imagination in September 2015 with its strangely fluctuating brightness. ...
Astronomy
Oct 5, 2017
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Dim objects called brown dwarfs, less massive than the sun but more massive than Jupiter, have powerful winds and clouds–specifically, hot patchy clouds made of iron droplets and silicate dust. Scientists recently realized ...
Astronomy
Aug 18, 2017
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If we want to know more about whether life could survive on a planet outside our solar system, it's important to know the age of its star. Young stars have frequent releases of high-energy radiation called flares that can ...
Astronomy
Aug 14, 2017
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Brown dwarf stars are failed stars. Their masses are so small, less than about eighty Jupiter-masses, that they lack the ability to heat up their interiors to the roughly ten million kelvin temperatures required for normal ...
Astronomy
Jul 11, 2017
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The moon hanging in the night sky sent Robert Hurt's mind into deep space—to a region some 40 light years away, in fact, where seven Earth-sized planets crowded close to a dim, red sun.
Astronomy
Jun 8, 2017
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Astronomers have produced a highly detailed image of the Crab Nebula, by combining data from telescopes spanning nearly the entire breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves seen by the Karl G. Jansky Very ...
Astronomy
May 10, 2017
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NASA's SOFIA aircraft, a 747 loaded with a 2.5-meter telescope in the back and stripped of most creature comforts in the front, took a big U-turn over the Pacific west of Mexico.
Astronomy
May 2, 2017
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440
On Feb. 22, astronomers announced that the ultra-cool dwarf star, TRAPPIST-1, hosts a total of seven Earth-size planets that are likely rocky, a discovery made by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope in combination with ground-based ...
Astronomy
Mar 9, 2017
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A new study led by University of California, Riverside astronomers casts light on how young, hot stars ionize oxygen in the early universe and the effects on the evolution of galaxies through time.
Astronomy
Oct 7, 2016
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This image of galaxy cluster Abell 2744, also called Pandora's Cluster, was taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope. The gravity of this galaxy cluster is strong enough that it acts as a lens to magnify images of more distant ...
Astronomy
Sep 29, 2016
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