Red supergiants are a class of star that end their lives in supernova explosions. Their lifecycles are not fully understood, partly due to difficulties in measuring their temperatures. For the first time, astronomers have ...
Astronomy
Mar 1, 2021
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253
A supernova in a nearby galaxy may have originated from an explosion of a blue supergiant formed by the merger of two stars, simulations by RIKEN astrophysicists suggest. The asymmetric nature of this explosion may provide ...
Astronomy
Mar 19, 2020
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474
Late last year, news broke that the star Betelgeuse was fading significantly, ultimately dropping to around 40% of its usual brightness. The activity fueled popular speculation that the red supergiant would soon explode as ...
Astronomy
Mar 6, 2020
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1648
Using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have captured the unprecedented dimming of Betelgeuse, a red supergiant star in the constellation of Orion. The stunning new images of the star's surface show not only the ...
Astronomy
Feb 14, 2020
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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
European astronomers have investigated a recently discovered hard X-ray transient known as IGR J17503-2636 using space observatories. Results of this study, presented in a paper published March 7 on the arXiv pre-print server, ...
A post-asymptotic giant branch (post-AGB) star known as HD 179821 turns out to be significantly less massive than previously thought, according to a new study. Using new data from ESA's Gaia satellite, astronomers found that ...
Located 65 million light-years away is a blue supergiant star that once existed inside a cluster of young stars in the spiral galaxy NGC 3938, as shown in this artist's concept. It exploded as a supernova in 2017 and Hubble ...
Astronomy
Nov 16, 2018
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10
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
Astronomer J. Craig Wheeler of The University of Texas at Austin thinks that Betelgeuse, the bright red star marking the shoulder of Orion, the hunter, may have had a past that is more interesting than meets the eye. Working ...
Astronomy
Dec 19, 2016
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