Scientists discover a planet-eating star
Astronomers studied light emissions from a star system 2 years after its peak brightness and saw that it had consumed and partially spat out…
Tag: stars
Alien life could face threats from passing stars and supernovae
Astronomers examined 84 of the closest known stars with potentially habitable exoplanets and found that 3 face possible extinction-level…
How did supermassive black holes form?
An astronomer analyzed ancient supermassive black holes with mathematical models and found they likely grew exponentially after light,…
Searching for the first supernovae in the universe
Astronomers developed new theoretical models for how stars evolve that suggest the JWST could glimpse the oldest stars in the universe…
Why do galaxies shrink?
An astronomer studying the 3 main processes that cause galaxies to lose mass found that the dominant process depends on the size and age of…
Why the Milky Way is shaped like a spiral
A team of astronomers reconstructed a 3-part history of the Milky Way Galaxy by comparing the physics and chemistry of 10 million red giant…
Machine learning has its limits when studying hard-to-see galaxies
Scientists in South America and Italy found that a machine-learning algorithm astronomers commonly use to analyze large datasets classified…
Scientists found neutron stars merge to make heavy elements
A team of astrophysicists in China simulated collisions between the remains of former stars and showed the resulting explosions could…
The universe’s dust is on the decline
Astronomers found the density of dust in the universe has been steadily decreasing for the last 10 billion years, as it coalesced to form…
Creating a cosmic family tree
Astronomers traced the genealogy of a kilonova explosion by using models to find its most likely parent stars.