Category Astronomy/Space

Imagine taking a star twice the mass of the sun and crushing it to the size of Manhattan. The result would be a neutron star—one of the densest objects found anywhere in the universe, exceeding the density of any material found naturally on Earth by a factor of tens of trillions. Neutron stars are extraordinary astrophysical objects in their own right, but their extreme densities might also allow them to function as laboratories for studying fundamental questions of nuclear physics, under conditions that could never be reproduced on Earth.

Because of these exotic conditions, scientists still do not understand what exactly neutron stars themselves are made from, their so-called “equation of state” (EoS)...

Astronomers from Liverpool John Moores University and the University of Montpellier have devised an ‘early warning’ system to sound the alert when a massive star is about ...

Astronomers have observed directly for the first time how intense light from stars can ‘push’ matter. Researchers made the observation when tracking a giant plume of dust generated by the violent interactions between two massive stars.

The results, made using infrared images of the binary star system WR140 taken over 16 years, are reported in the journal Nature.

In a complementary study of WR140, published in Nature Astronomy, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was able to see much deeper to snap an image of not just a single accelerating dust plume, but almost 20 of them, nested inside each other like a giant set of onion skins.

WR140 is compri...

Astronomers have observed a black hole burping up stellar remains years after it shredded and consumed the star. In October 2018, a small star was ripped to shreds when it wandered too close to a black hole in a galaxy located 665 million light years away from Earth. Though it may sound thrilling, the event did not come as a surprise to astronomers who occasionally witness these violent incidents while scanning the night sky.

But nearly three years after the massacre, the same black hole is lighting up the skies again — and it hasn’t swallowed anything new, scientists say.

“This caught us completely by surprise — no one has ever seen anything like this before,” says Yvette Cendes, a research associate at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvar...