constellation Scorpius tagged posts

This glittering gathering of stars is Pismis 26, a globular star cluster located about 23,000 light-years away. Many thousands of stars gleam brightly against the black backdrop of the image, with some brighter red and blue stars located along the outskirts of the cluster. The Armenian astronomer Paris Pismis first discovered the cluster in 1959 at the Tonantzintla Observatory in Mexico, granting it the dual name Tonantzintla 2.

Pismis 26 is located in the constellation Scorpius near the galactic bulge, which is an area near the center of our galaxy that holds a dense, spheroidal grouping of stars that surrounds a black hole...

This image shows the recovered nova of March 11, 1437 and its ejected shell. It was taken with the Carnegie SWOPE 1-meter telescope in Chile using a filter that highlights the hot hydrogen gas of the shell. The now-quiescent star that produced the nova shell is indicated with red tick marks; it is far from the shell’s center today. However, its measured motion across the sky places it at the red ‘+’ in 1437. The position of the center of the shell in 1437 is at the green plus sign. The agreement of the 1437 positions of the shell center and of the old nova are the ‘clock’ that demonstrates that the old nova of 1437 A.D. really is the source of the shell. Credit: © K. Ilkiewicz and J. Mikolajewska

New study proves that novae have long-term life cycle with multiple stages...

This is AR Scorpii, the first discovered white dwarf pulsar. Credit: Mark Garlick/University of Warwick

An exotic binary star system 380 light-years away has been identified as an elusive white dwarf pulsar – the first of its kind ever to be discovered in the universe – thanks to research by the University of Warwick. Professors Tom Marsh and Boris Gänsicke (University of Warwick’s Astrophysics Group), with Dr David Buckley (South African Astronomical Observatory), have identified the star AR Scorpii (AR Sco) as the first white dwarf version of a pulsar – objects found in the 1960s and associated with very different objects called neutron stars.

The white dwarf pulsar has eluded astronomers for over half a century...