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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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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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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Astronomers studied the gamma-ray burst GRB130925A – a flash of very energetic radiation streaming from a star in a distant galaxy – using space- and ground-based observatories.
Astronomy
Jul 11, 2014
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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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(Phys.org) —It's been a busy week for space scientists—a team of astronomers discovered the first Thorne-Zytkow object—it's a weird type of hybrid between a red supergiant and a neutron star that looks like a regular ...
In a discovery decades in the making, scientists have detected the first of a "theoretical" class of stars first proposed in 1975 by physicist Kip Thorne and astronomer Anna Żytkow. Thorne-Żytkow objects (TŻOs) are hybrids ...
Astronomy
Jun 4, 2014
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A supergiant star exploded 23.5 million years ago in one of the largest and brightest nearby galaxies. This spring we finally got the news. In April, the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT) as part of the Lick Observatory ...
Astronomy
May 23, 2014
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(Phys.org) —Astronomers have released a new image of the outer atmosphere of Betelgeuse – one of the nearest red supergiants to Earth – revealing the detailed structure of the matter being thrown off the star.
Astronomy
Apr 24, 2013
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(Phys.org) —A team led by the University of Warwick has pinpointed a new type of exceptionally powerful and long-lived cosmic explosion, prompting a theory that they arise in the violent death throes of a supergiant star.
Astronomy
Apr 16, 2013
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