chemical evolution tagged posts

Towards the end of their lives some 95% of stars evolve into red giants which lose their mass via a “stellar wind.” Eventually they end up as planetary nebulae, ionized gas with a central hot star, a white dwarf. Researchers form 14 European scientific institutions, among them the IAC, have detected the existence of a binary interaction which had not been noticed by the scientific community...

The Perseus galaxy cluster, located about 240 million light-years away, is shown in this composite of visible light (green and red) and near-infrared images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Unseen here is a thin, hot, X-ray-emitting gas that fills the cluster. Credit: Robert Lupton and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Consortium

Thanks to an in-depth look into the composition of gas in the Perseus galaxy cluster, Japan’s Hitomi mission has given scientists new insights into the stellar explosions that formed its chemical elements. Before its brief mission ended unexpectedly in March 2016, Japan’s Hitomi X-ray observatory captured exceptional information about the motions of hot gas in the Perseus galaxy cluster...