A new instrument that combines two high-resolution telescope techniques – adaptive optics and interferometry – has for the first time resolved in visible light the individual stars in the binary star system Capella, 43 light years from Earth. Astronomers using the instrument say it holds great promise for eventually picking out and imaging planets around […]
Tag Archives | Star
Mysterious “anti-glitch” observed in neutron star’s rotation
Astronomers using NASA’s Swift X-ray Telescope have observed a spinning neutron star suddenly slowing down, a never before seen event that is expected to catalyze renewed efforts to better understand the puzzling physics of these bizarre stellar remnants. The star, known as 1E2259 586, is in the Northern Hemisphere sky in the constellation Cassiopeia. The […]
Black Holes A Cosmic Contraceptive?
Astronomers from Yale and Leiden University in The Netherlands have discovered that old stars dominated many large galaxies in the early universe, raising the issue of why these galaxies progressed into galactic adulthood so early on in the life of the universe. Cosmologists know that every year, only a handful of new stars are born […]
Stars Gone Wild
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has snapped some pictures of the dusty core of two merging galaxies and uncovered a region where star formation has gone wild. The colliding galaxies appear as a single, strange looking galaxy named Arp 220 (the galaxy is the 220th object in Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies). Astronomers say the […]