Celestial fireworks celebrate Hubble's 25th anniversary

The glittering tapestry of young stars flaring to life in this new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image aptly resembles an exploding shell in a fireworks display. This vibrant image of the star cluster Westerlund 2 has been ...

Recipe for water: Just add starlight

ESA's (European Space Agency) Herschel infrared space observatory has discovered that ultraviolet starlight is a key ingredient for making water in the atmosphere of some stars. It is the only explanation for why a dying ...

Energetic particles can bombard exoplanets

TRAPPIST-1 is a system of seven Earth-sized worlds orbiting an ultra-cool dwarf star about 120 light-years away. The star, and hence its system of planets, is thought to be between five-to-ten billion years old, up to twice ...

How planetary nebulae get their shapes

About 7.5 billion years from now, our sun will have converted most of its hydrogen fuel into helium through fusion, and then burned most of that helium into carbon and oxygen. It will have swollen to a size large enough to ...

Stellar winds may electrify exoplanets

(Phys.org) —The strangest class of exoplanets found to date might be even stranger than astronomers have thought. A new model suggests that they are partially heated by electric currents linked to their host stars. Florida ...

First clear view of a boiling cauldron where stars are born

University of Maryland researchers created the first high-resolution image of an expanding bubble of hot plasma and ionized gas where stars are born. Previous low-resolution images did not clearly show the bubble or reveal ...

A spectacular landscape of star formation

This image, captured by the Wide Field Imager at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile, shows two dramatic star formation regions in the Milky Way. The first, on the left, is dominated by the star cluster NGC 3603, located ...

Two Hubble views of the same stellar nursery

These NASA Hubble Space Telescope images compare two diverse views of the roiling heart of a vast stellar nursery, known as the Lagoon Nebula. The images, one taken in visible and the other in infrared light, celebrate Hubble's ...

page 7 from 13