Spaghettification — it may sound like a cartoon wizard’s spell effect but it’s actually a term scientists use for what happens to massive objects that get too close to a black hole…they’re literally pulled apart into long strands of material by the black hole’s immense gravity. “Massive objects” can mean planets, asteroids, spaceships, or even…
Tag: stars
New Horizons is Far Enough from Earth to See an “Alien Sky”
(News from JHUAPL) For the first time, a spacecraft has sent back pictures of the sky from so far away that some stars appear to be in different positions than we see from Earth. More than four billion miles from home and speeding toward interstellar space, NASA’s New Horizons has traveled so far that it…
NGC 6441: One of the Milky Way’s Most Massive Star Clusters
(NASA’s image of the day on June 5, 2020) Almost like snowflakes, the stars of the globular cluster NGC 6441 sparkle peacefully in the night sky, about 13,000 light-years from the Milky Way’s galactic center. Like snowflakes, the exact number of stars in such a cluster is difficult to discern. It is estimated that together…
Hypothesized First-Gen Stars Remain Unseen in Hubble Deep Views
(News from NASA) New results from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope suggest the formation of the first stars and galaxies in the early universe took place sooner than previously thought. A European team of astronomers have found no evidence of the first generation of stars, known as Population III stars, as far back as when…
A Dusty Twist Marks the Site of a New Planet’s Birth
All of the planets in our Solar System formed from a disk of dust and gas surrounding our home star—the Sun—about four and a half billion years ago. Many—maybe even most—of the stars we see in the sky have planets orbiting them, and they all probably formed the same way. But planetary formation is…
Scientists Use “Sunglasses” to See Bands of Clouds on a Brown Dwarf
(News via Caltech) Astronomers have detected what appear to be bands of clouds streaking across the surface of a cool star-like body known as a brown dwarf. The bands, resembling those that stripe the surface of Jupiter, were discovered using polarimetry, a technique that works in the same way that polarized sunglasses block out the…
Cute Science Video Alert: The Story of Stars
Like people, stars are found in all colors and sizes. They can range from small, sassy red dwarfs to giant blue beasts. In fact there are seven main types of stars, grouped by their apparent colors (and thus temperatures) and classified as O, B, A, F, G, K, or M in order of hottest to coolest. (Learn more about…
These Photos Taken from the Moon Show Lots and Lots of Stars
One of the favorite allegations by those who continue to be skeptical of the Apollo moon landings is that there are no stars visible in the photographs taken by the astronauts while they were “supposedly” on the Moon. Now while there’s a rather short but succinct list of why that’s the case (and feel free to review those…
This Nebula Really Stinks!
This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the Calabash Nebula, the cosmic death throes of a low-mass star like our Sun. Caught during the astronomically brief phase between a red giant and a planetary nebula, the star is ejecting much of its mass out into space at velocities of over 620,000 mph. So why does it “stink?” The bright…
This Beautiful Webcomic Shows Why Our “Mathematical Skies” Have Not Lost Their Wonder
People of past civilizations had their own ideas of what the stars in the night sky are… distant campfires, lights shining through holes in a vast blanket covering the Earth, deceased ancestors, countless and constantly-traveling gods… whether or not they really believed these stories or if they were just tales to inspire poets and provide…
Cassini Spots the Sombrero Galaxy from Saturn
We’re all used to seeing fantastic images of Saturn and its family of moons from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which has spent the last decade in orbit around the ringed world. But every now and then Cassini aims its cameras outwards, capturing images of the sky beyond Saturn – just like we might look up at the…
Our Five-Trillion-Mile Close Call: the Star(s) That Skimmed the Solar System
It’s like something out of a Hollywood film or a science fiction novel: a dark star sneaks up on Earth from just outside the Solar System, discovered too late to do anything about it (and really, what could we do?) and plows through the cloud of comets that surrounds the Sun like a haze of icy gnats, sending them flying…
Lights in the Dark 