Category Astronomy/Space

The planet Kepler-438b is shown here in front of its violent parent star. It is regularly irradiated by huge flares of radiation, which could render the planet uninhabitable. Here the planet’s atmosphere is shown being stripped away. Credit: With credit to Mark A Garlick/University of Warwick

The most Earth-like planet could have been made uninhabitable by vast quantities of radiation.The atmosphere of the planet, Kepler-438b, is thought to have been stripped away as a result of radiation emitted from a superflaring red dwarf star, Kepler-438. Regularly occurring every few hundred days, the superflares are approximately 10X more powerful than those ever recorded on the sun and equivalent to the same energy as 100 billion megatons of TNT.

While superflares themselves are unlikely to have a ...

ESO’s VISTA survey telescope has spied a horde of previously hidden massive galaxies that existed when the Universe was in its infancy. By discovering and studying more of these galaxies than ever before, astronomers have for the first time found out exactly when such monster galaxies first appeared. The newly discovered massive galaxies are marked on this image of the UltraVISTA field. Credit: ESO/UltraVISTA team. Acknowledgement: TERAPIX/CNRS/INSU/CASU

By discovering and studying more of these galaxies than ever before, astronomers have, for the first time, found out exactly when such monster galaxies first appeared...

An image of LX Cyg and its surroundings, obtained with the 80cm telescope at the University of Vienna Observatory. Credit: Stefan Uttenthaler et al./University of Vienna

A carbon star is a giant red star nearing the end of its life, with an atmosphere containing more carbon than oxygen. LX Cygni could be an interesting example of an object that is currently in the process of transitioning into a carbon star. “These observations are important to understand the chemical evolution of the universe, because most of the carbon in the universe is thought to come from stars just like LX Cygni,” Uttenthaler said.

Most of the carbon in our bodies comes from an earlier generation of stars such as LX Cygni...

The monstrous elliptical galaxy M87, located 53 million light-years from Earth is the dominant galaxy at the center of the neighboring Virgo cluster of galaxies. Astronomers have measured the ‘heartbeats’ of stars within M87 and used that data to determine the galaxy’s age in a new way. This photograph was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys instrument. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team

In many ways stars are like living beings. They’re born; they live; they die. And they even have a heartbeat. Using a novel technique, astronomers have detected thousands of stellar ‘pulses’ in the galaxy Messier 87 (M87). Their measurements offer a new way of determining a galaxy’s age.

We tend to think of stars as stable and unchanging...