Stars

Astronomers are celebrating the 4th of July weekend by releasing a new image of some cosmic fireworks. The spectacular shot is made up of a mosaic of radio and infrared images, showing a cluster of young stars exploding into life.

A star that shined with 2.5 million times the light of our Sun has disappeared from the night sky. It is possible that the star collapsed into a black hole without first triggering a supernova – a rare event, even in the context of dying stars.

The night sky is a beautiful canvas for photography, and the Milky Way is the star (pun intended) of the show. The latest edition of the annual Milky Way Photographer of the Year features absolutely stunning shots of our home galaxy and planet.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a striking sight in the Serpens Nebula – a huge shadow in the shape of a bat. Now, follow-up observations have shown that it appears to be flapping its wings, which may be the influence of a nearby planet.

NASA has released a time-lapse video of our Sun that condenses 10 full years of solar observations into a 61 minute movie. The shots were taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, which has been keeping vigil over our parent star for a decade.

The LIGO-Virgo collaboration has reported a very strange gravitational wave signal. This signal appears to have come from a black hole swallowing some unknown object, with a mass that sits in a range thought to be empty.

Astronomers at NASA and ESA have discovered the youngest pulsar known. This celestial child is a mere 240 years old, and its birth would have been visible on Earth at the time as a supernova. This little star is known as Swift J1818.0−1607.

NASA's New Horizons deep-space probe has, for the first time, returned images to Earth that showed stellar parallax, or how the positions of stars shift when seen from two different places. This could one day be used for interstellar navigation.

Astrophysicists have found evidence of quark matter at the heart of compact stars. Combining recent theoretical calculations with astrophysical observations, the researchers found that the most massive neutron stars most likely have “quark cores.”

According to the results of a new study, stars orbiting near the centers of massive clusters have a much harder time forming planets than their smaller siblings located nearer the edge, and they may have themselves to blame.

The universe is full of explosions, and now astronomers have described a brand new class of space signals. Named fast blue optical transients (FBOTs), these events are very bright and throw off incredible amounts of energy in a short amount of time.

Astronomers have discovered a “cosmic ring of fire” – a galaxy shaped like a gigantic donut. This extremely rare galaxy was likely caused by a collision with a smaller galaxy that can still be seen lingering near the scene of the accident.