Stars

Two astronomers at the University of Cambridge have put ages on six nearby red dwarf stars that host planets, and they report that a star's rotation dates it far more tightly than its motion through…

A white dwarf that abruptly reignited in 1996 has now been confirmed as a Wolf-Rayet-type star, with new spectroscopy from the Very Large Telescope providing the first direct measurement of its…

Researchers have put a ceiling on the most energetic flare the Sun could produce, and it reaches into the range of the biggest outbursts seen on other stars like it. Natalie Krivova and Emre Isik of…

Stellar evolution models in which the young Sun swallowed a rocky planet about five times the mass of Earth match measurements of the Sun's interior better than standard solar models do, Mutlu Yıldız…

Saskia Hekker of the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies and Heidelberg University has put forward an explanation for what starts the luminosity bump, the short stretch in which an aging…

Almost every massive star in the galaxy has a companion, and almost everything known about those pairs comes from looking at them long after they finished forming. By then the orbit has had millions…

The star blew up when the universe was about a quarter of its present age, and by the time its light reached Earth it should have been a smudge: too faint to take a spectrum of, too faint to follow…

Twelve nearby stars near the top of the target list for NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory expose their habitable zones to 10 to 100 times as much X-ray and extreme-ultraviolet radiation as the…

Tucked inside a glowing bubble of gas roughly 26,000 light-years away, in a crowded patch of the Milky Way called Sagittarius C, a faint blue smudge of X-rays has caught astronomers' attention. They…

Astronomers have counted 22 arc-shaped shock waves in the faint outer halo of the Helix Nebula, where clumps of material shed by a dying star are ploughing into the thin gas between stars. The work…

Supernovae are hard on families. When a massive star collapses and blows off its outer layers, the sudden loss of mass and the kick delivered to the remnant usually wreck whatever gravitational…

Few stars have carried as much baggage as KIC 8462852. Better known as Tabby's star, after astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, it made headlines in 2015 for dimming in ways no ordinary planet could produce:…