Stars

Space is an endless void of mysterious unknowns, and one particularly alluring enigma concerns the point at which neutron stars take on too much mass and collapse into black holes. Astronomers have shed new light on where this threshold may lie with the discovery of the most massive neutron star ever measured, a record-setting object that stretches the limits of what scientists believed was physically possible.

Given their name, black holes aren’t the kind of places you’d expect to see much light. But sometimes flashes of light are seen as the black holes snack on gas and dust. Earlier this year though the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy flared up in an unprecedented light show, and astronomers don’t really know why.

In NGC 6946, better known as the Fireworks galaxy, an extremely bright flare of X-rays was seen to appear and disappear within a matter of weeks.

A bright explosion in the sky in 2016 has now been identified as a kilonova, where two neutron stars collide and create gold.

It looks like a Jackson Pollock painting, but this colorful mess is a new map of the Milky Way, showing strange star structures.

Astronomers have detected a gravitational wave signal that appears to be caused by a black hole swallowing a neutron star. Aside from being an incredible cosmic cataclysm to witness, this detection is important for another reason: it may be the final point in the gravitational wave trifecta.

A galaxy seems like a hard thing to miss – let alone 39 of them – but that’s exactly what a team of astronomers has just discovered. So where have these countless stars been hiding? About 11.5 billion light-years away, in a part of the light spectrum that’s invisible to many telescopes.

In about five billion years’ time, the Sun will grow into a red giant, destroy the Earth and become a white dwarf star. But according to a new study, any aliens out there might still be able to pick up radio waves from Earth's planetary core – for up to a billion years.

White dwarf stars are thought to follow very specific “rules” – if they’re over a certain mass limit, they’ll explode in a supernova with a very predictable brightness and time. But now Caltech astronomers have found a strange twist: white dwarfs used to explode at lower masses than they do today.

While we have some idea about what kinds of signs of life to look for on other planets, many of these can also be created under natural processes. Now NASA is about to launch a new mission that can help root out these false positives by studying the interactions between stars and their planets.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered three worlds orbiting a star located a mere 73 light-years from Earth. The exoplanets are a tempting target for scientists hoping to understand how planets form, and may even be a future hunting ground for E.T.

Human lives make it impossible to witness the full life cycles of stars, planets and galaxies. But sometimes, if we’re lucky, astronomers might be able to catch crucial moments playing out before their eyes. Now a team has done just that, watching as a red giant star goes through its death throes.