Stars, Space | featured news

Researchers find that 6% of red dwarf stars host habitable, Earth-sized planets - meaning the closest may be just 13 light-years away.

Astronomers trawling through a mess of stellar data discover that Tau Ceti, our nearest single Sun-like star, hosts five planets - one in its "habitable zone".

Using NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope, scientists were able to detect the light of the earliest stars, which are now long since gone... One of the primary goals of the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope is to measure the starlight in the universe and use that to figure out how much light has ever shone in it. Yesterday, astronomers on Fermi’s research team announced that they have reached that goal.

Scientists have located a galaxy that gives births to more stars in a day than ours does in a year. Astronomers used NASA's Chandra X-Ray telescope to spot this distant gigantic galaxy creating about 740 new stars a year. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy spawns just about one new star each year.

Some people seem born under an unlucky star. But some stars are equally unlucky themselves. Astronomers have spotted a star in another galaxy plunging toward a giant black hole and being ripped to shreds, sparking a flare so brilliant that observers detected it from a distance of 2.1 billion light-years.

The more astronomers look for other worlds, the more they find that it's a crowded and crazy cosmos. They think planets easily outnumber stars in our galaxy and they're even finding them in the strangest of places... "We're finding an exciting potpourri of things we didn't even think could exist," said Harvard University astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger, including planets that mirror "Star Wars" Luke Skywalker's home planet with twin suns and a mini-star system with a dwarf sun and shrunken planets.

An international astronomy team reports the closest exploding star seen in four decades.

Clouds may make a world orbiting a nearby star suitable for life, reports an international astronomer team.

Late in 2009 year we witnessed the largest explosion ever recorded: a super giant star two hundred times bigger than the sun utterly obliterated by runaway thermonuclear reactions triggered by gamma ray-driven antimatter production.

Completing an orbit in less than an Earth day, planet Wasp-18b should have burned up, according to accepted theory. Scientists have discovered a planet that shouldn't exist. The finding, they say, could alter our understanding of orbital dynamics, a field considered pretty well settled since the time of astronomer Johannes Kepler 400 years ago.