Turbulence in gas clouds may be the key to counter-acting gravity and allowing massive stars to form.

Scientists have long known that stars are formed from swirling clouds of gas and dust that coalesce. But why some of these stellar nurseries give rise to ordinary stars like our sun and others can pop out stars 15 to 30 times as massive is something of a conundrum. [...]

Source: Space.com – click here for full article

 

 

This color-composite image of the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, was taken by the Palomar 48-inch Schmidt telescope and is part of the Digitized Sky Survey. Credit: NASA, ESA and AURA/Caltech

It’s an ideal time to break out your binoculars and explore the profusion of open or galactic star clusters.

With the waxing Moon not overly bright this week, it’s an ideal time to break out your binoculars and explore the profusion of open or galactic star clusters now evident in our evening sky. Such clusters represent aggregations of young, recently born stars. They are in our galaxy’s local spiral arm, into whose interior we are looking at this time of year. These stars condensed out of the interstellar gas in this part of our Milky Way system. [...]

Source: Space.com – click here for full article

 

SYDNEY: A nuclear explosion on the surface of a binary star within a planetary nebula has been detected – an event not witnessed for more than 100 years.

A paper on the finding, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, predicts that the combined mass of the two stars in the system may be high enough for the stars to eventually spiral into each other, triggering a much bigger double supernova explosion.

At the ends of their lives – prior to an all-encompassing supernova – some stars undergo nova explosions, caused by nuclear reactions on their surface.

“Runaway thermonuclear explosion”

“The star which erupted was a nova, an event caused when matter is transferred from one star in a close binary system onto its companion, eventually triggering a runaway thermonuclear explosion,” said Roger Wesson, lead astronomer behind the discovery at University College London in England.

Source: Cosmos Online – click here for full article