Category Astronomy/Space

This is a molecular gas around star LL Pegasi. Credit: ALMA, Hyosun Kim

Using a powerful telescope, scientists view spiral pattern of gaseous emissions around LL Pegasi and its companion star. An international team of astronomers has observed a striking spiral pattern in the gas surrounding a red giant star named LL Pegasi and its companion star 3,400 light-years from Earth using ALMA. “What we are seeing in splendid detail with these observations is the final act of a dying red giant star, as it sheds most of its gaseous bulk in a strong, outflowing wind,” said Mark Morris, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy.

After comparing their telescopic observations with computer simulations, the astronomers concluded that a highly elliptical orbit is responsible for the shape of the gaseous emi...

This composite image of the Kleinmann-Low Nebula, part of the Orion Nebula complex, is composed of several pointings of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope in optical and near-infrared light. Infrared light allows to peer through the dust of the nebula and to see the stars therein. The revealed stars are shown with a bright red colour in the image.
Credit: NASA, ESA/Hubble

In the search for rogue planets and failed stars astronomers using Hubble have created a new mosaic image of the Orion Nebula. During their survey of the famous star formation region, they found what may be the missing piece of a cosmic puzzle; the third, long-lost member of a star system that had broken apart.

The Orion Nebula is the closest star formation region to Earth, only 1400 light-years away...

Numerical simulation of the fragmentation of a cluster of stars up to the formation of stars (left) with a zoom on the most central part of the cluster (right). The inclination axes of the masses similar to those observed by the Kepler satellite (in cluster NGC 6791) align in this simulation when the kinetic energy of the original cloud is comparable to the ambient turbulent energy. © E.Corsaro & Y.-N Lee

Using asteroseismology, an international team including CEA, CNRS and Université Grenoble-Alpes discovered a surprising alignment of the rotation axes of stars in open clusters, shedding light on the conditions in which stars are formed in our galaxy...

In this artist’s rendering, a thick accretion disk has formed around a supermassive black hole following the tidal disruption of a star that wandered too close. Stellar debris has fallen toward the black hole and collected into a thick chaotic disk of hot gas. Flashes of X-ray light near the center of the disk result in light echoes that allow astronomers to map the structure of the funnel-like flow, revealing for the first time strong gravity effects around a normally quiescent black hole. Credit: NASA/Swift/Aurore Simonnet, Sonoma State University

Data suggest black holes swallow stellar debris in bursts...