massive stars tagged posts

Red alert: Massive Stars Sound Warning they are about to go Supernova

This artist’s impression shows the supergiant star Betelgeuse as it was revealed thanks to different state-of-the-art techniques on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), which allowed two independent teams of astronomers to obtain the sharpest ever views of the supergiant star Betelgeuse. They show that the star has a vast plume of gas almost as large as our Solar System and a gigantic bubble boiling on its surface. These discoveries provide important clues to help explain how these mammoths shed material at such a tremendous rate. Credit: European Southern Observatory/L. Calçada Licence type Attribution (CC BY 4.0)

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 ...

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Runaway Stars leave Infrared Waves in Space

Bow shocks thought to mark the paths of massive, speeding stars are highlighted in these images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Wyoming

Bow shocks thought to mark the paths of massive, speeding stars are highlighted in these images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Wyoming

Astronomers are finding dozens of the fastest stars in our galaxy with the help of images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. When some speedy, massive stars plow through space, they can cause material to stack up in front of them in the same way that water piles up ahead of a ship. Called bow shocks, these dramatic, arc-shaped features in space are leading researchers to uncover massive, so-called runaway stars.

“Some stars get the boot when their companion star explodes in a supernova, and others can get kicked ou...

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