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A University of Warwick team has calculated what white dwarf stars would look like to the human eye, and reports that one of them, WD J1330+6435, would appear green. Nobody has photographed one: no…
Almost everything anyone knows about when the Solar System began rests on a few pale specks inside meteorites. They are calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions, grains condensed from hot gas close to the…
Researchers at Southwest Research Institute have built a way to feed sunspot groups detected on the far side of the Sun into a model that tracks how the Sun's magnetic field moves across its surface.…
Somewhere between the smallest stars and the largest planets sits a population of objects that never settled the question. They condense out of collapsing gas clouds the way stars do, then stall: too…
Nothing holds a white dwarf up except its own electrons, which refuse to be pushed any closer together. Work out how much weight that refusal can carry and the answer is about 1.44 times the mass of…
The shape was wrong. A light curve, the record of how a point of light brightens and fades, is supposed to look like a bell or a wave. This one looked like a triangle, and it repeated. Kevin Burdge,…
A team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) reports the first detection in space of fully deuterated methanol, found in the gas around a star that is still…
Deep images from the Gemini North telescope have resolved the spoke-like filaments of the supernova remnant Pa 30 into cascades of small knots. In light emitted by sulfur, the images show about ten…
Every image the James Webb Space Telescope sends home is really a stack of images. Its near-infrared camera does not gather light for a few minutes and then read the detector once at the end. It…
The James Webb Space Telescope has recorded methane giving off light rather than absorbing it in the atmosphere of a young brown dwarf, in what the observing team reports as the first detection of…
The Milky Way ate its neighbors, and the meals left traces. Stars pulled in from galaxies that fell into ours billions of years ago still thread through the outer Galaxy on orbits far more stretched…
Two physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen report that letting neutrinos switch from one type to another as they stream out of a dying star changes which stars explode and which…