star news stories on Newser

NASA Finds Planet Circling Two Stars

Kevin Spak — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:17:05 CDT

NASA has found another decidedly nifty planet. Meet Kepler-16b, the first planet ever verified to have two suns—kind of like Tatooine from Star Wars , NASA noted in its announcement . There’s no way the Saturn-sized world is habitable—it’s at least half gas—but “the discovery confirms a new class...

NASA Spots Runaway Star

Polly Davis Doig — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 12:32:56 CST

NASA's latest find is a runaway star with about 20 times the mass of our sun, slamming through space at an eye-popping 54,000 miles per hour, reports Space.com. NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) caught Zeta Ophiuchi in a spectacular infrared image that shows a massive star blanketed...

NASA Studying Strange, Star-Creating Blob

Kevin Spak — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 08:43:18 CST

The Hubble Telescope has turned its gaze to a mysterious glowing green blob that’s creating stars where stars shouldn’t normally form. Dubbed Hanny’s Voorwerp, after the Dutch elementary school teacher who first discovered it in 2007, the blob is a swirling mass of hydrogen gas, caused by a close encounter...

Bits of One Universe's First Stars Spotted

Rob Quinn — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 03:16:00 CST

Astronomers believe they have spotted the remains of one of the universe's very first stars—a "missing link" between the Big Bang and today's universe. The gas cloud left behind when the star exploded more than 13 billion years ago was illuminated by light emitted from a quasar, the BBC...

Astronomers Triple Universe's Star Count

Rob Quinn — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 04:00:05 CST

The known universe just got a lot more crowded. Astronomers studying distant, elliptical galaxies say they spotted many more red dwarf stars than anticipated, suggesting that the number of stars in the universe is triple earlier estimates, the Daily Mail reports. The researchers now believe there are three septillion stars...

NASA Finds Singing Stars

Kevin Spak — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 10:23:00 CDT

NASA has discovered a group of massive red stars that are actually humming to themselves. The planet-hunting Kepler space telescope recently spotted sound waves emanating from the stars, the Wall Street Journal reports. NASA recorded the tune, and played it recently at a press conference in Denmark. “It is a...

'Cannibal Star' Eats Neighbor

Rob Quinn — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 02:21:00 CDT

A "cannibal" star in the Pisces constellation appears to have gobbled up its neighbor and belched out a disc of dusty matter. X-Ray images revealed the remains of either a young star or a large planet inside BP Piscium, which has recently entered the expanding "red giant" phase of its...

'Citizen Scientists' Find Rare Star

Rob Quinn — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 05:36:03 CDT

Three regular people who volunteered to put their idle home computers to work crunching scientific data in off-hours have been credited with making a major discovery in deep space. The "citizen scientists"—two in Iowa and one in Germany—downloaded and processed the data that found a disrupted binary pulsar...

Astronomers Discover Impossibly Huge Star

Kevin Spak — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:25:00 CDT

Astronomers have discovered a star so big and bright that it stretches the boundaries of what scientists believed was possible. The star, known so far only as R136a1, has an observed mass 265 times greater than our sun, and modeling suggests it was once 320 times bigger. “If it replaced...