red giant star tagged posts

Astronomers at the University of Sydney have found a slimmer type of red giant star for the first time. These stars have undergone dramatic weight loss, possibly due to the presence a greedy neighbour. Published in Nature Astronomy, the discovery is an important step forward to understanding the life of stars in the Milky Way – our closest stellar neighbours.

There are millions of ‘red giant’ stars found in our galaxy. These cool and luminous objects are what our Sun will become in four billion years. For some time, astronomers have predicted the existence of slimmer red giants. After finding a smattering of them, the University of Sydney team can finally confirm their existence.

“It’...

Another ancient star has been found lurking in the Milky Way. Around 35,000 light-years away, a red giant star named SMSS J160540.18–144323.1 was found to have the lowest iron levels of any star yet analysed in the galaxy.

This means that it’s one of the oldest stars in the Universe, probably belonging to the second generation of stars after the Universe burst into existence 13.8 billion years ago.

“This incredibly anaemic star, which likely formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang has iron levels 1...

The sky around W Hydrae, as seen in visible light. Credit: Digitized Sky Survey

A Chalmers-led team of astronomers has for the first time observed details on the surface of an aging star with the same mass as the Sun. The star is a giant, its diameter twice the size of Earth’s orbit around the Sun, but also that the star’s atmosphere is affected by powerful, unexpected shock waves. The research is published in Nature Astronomy on 30 October 2017. The new ALMA images show for the first time details on the surface of the red giant W Hydrae, 320 light years distant in the constellation of Hydra, the Water Snake.

W Hydrae is an example of an AGB (asymptotic giant branch) star. Such stars are cool, bright, old and lose mass via stellar winds...

High angular resolution images of CW Leo spanning more than eight years. Credit: Paul Stewart and Peter Tuthill, University of Sydney.

It is the brightest infrared star in the Northern sky, but a student has found that astronomers have been mistakenly interpreting the dust in the environment of a famous star that lies 450 light years from Earth. The star CW Leo aka IRC+10216, would be the second brightest star in the sky if our eyes could see infrared light. Images of its circumstellar environment released today reveal substantial evolution occurring over a span of more than 8 years, with none of the previously identified bright spots in fact containing the star, which is now believed to be buried in its own dust.

Graduate student Paul Stewart has reconstructed images from 2000 to 2008 – w...