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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Discovered in 1964 during a rocket flight, Cygnus X-1 holds the record for being the strongest X-ray source seen from Earth. The blue supergiant star designated as HDE 226868 is just part of this high-mass X-ray binary system... ...
Astronomy
Jun 23, 2011
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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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