Stellar evolution tagged posts

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows Supernova 1987A within the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring galaxy to our Milky Way. Credit: NASA, ESA, R. Kirshner (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation), and M. Mutchler and R. Avila (STScI)

3 decades ago, astronomers spotted one of the brightest exploding stars in more than 400 years. The titanic supernova, called Supernova 1987A (SN 1987A), blazed with the power of 100 million suns for several months following its discovery on Feb. 23, 1987. Since that first sighting, SN 1987A has continued to fascinate astronomers with its spectacular light show...

Globular cluster M4. Credit: NOAO/AURA/NSF

Using recent advancements in Australian telescope tech, a Monash Uni team has made an unexpected discovery that a large group of stars are dying prematurely, challenging our accepted view of stellar evolution revealing that large numbers of helium burning stars are dying prematurely in the M4 globular cluster. M4 is one of the closest and brightest globular clusters, and has already been very well studied. “Globular clusters are some of the oldest objects in the Universe. Although we have some ideas for what is going on in them, every time we look carefully we find something unexpected” said Professor Lattanzio.

Researchers used a new instrument called a high efficiency and resolution multi-element spectrograph (HERMES)...

Left: Chart of nuclides and important astrophysical reactions. Right: SOHO-EIT image from 14 September 1997 showing a huge eruptive prominence in the resonance line of singly ionized helium (He II) at 304 Angstroms in the extreme ultraviolet. The material in the eruptive prominence is at temperatures of 60,000 – 80,000 K, much cooler than the surrounding corona, which is typically at temperatures above 1 million K. Credit: Image courtesy of Texas A&M Cyclotron Institute and NASA

How old is the universe? What causes a star to catastrophically explode? Answering these and other questions about stellar evolutions requires knowing the rates of the reactions involved...

Artist’s impression of the baby star TMC-1A. The star is located in the center and surrounded by a rotating gas disk. Gas is infalling to the disk from the envelope further out. Credit: Image courtesy of National Astronomical Observatory of Japan

The first direct observations delineating the gas disk around a baby star from the infalling gas envelope has been made. This finding fills an important missing piece in our understanding of the early phases of stellar evolution. The baby star TMC-1A is 450 light years away in the constellation Taurus. TMC-1A is a protostar, a star still in the process of forming. Large amounts of gas still surround TMC-1A.

Stars form in dense gas clouds. Baby stars grow by taking in the surrounding gas. In this process, gas cannot flow directly into the star...