Binary star systems are regular solar systems in all respects but one – they have two stars at their core, and not just one. The bodies revolve around each other, or around a common center of mass, depending on their configuration. One such system can be found in the Ophiuchus Constellation, where the pair is m... |
22 April 2009
06:08 GMT |
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At some point, 5 billion years from now, the Sun will begin to swell and will slowly engulf the first planets in its vicinity, including our own. But life would have been obliterated long before this process actually occurred. Still, this is not necessarily a scary scenario, since while scorching our planet, the Sun ... |
11 December 2008
06:29 GMT |
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Scouring through the northern skies, the Hubble Space Telescope managed to capture a picture of a celestial body that resembles a snow globe. In fact, it is a globular cluster, a celestial formation that comprises over a hundred thousand stars swirling around in a small region of space. This object provides more insi... |
5 December 2008
05:38 GMT |
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Another planet has been discovered outside the boundaries of our solar system. A team of astronomers came upon the planet while performing observations with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope of McDonald Observatory in Texas. Actually, they did not observe the planet directly, but rather deduced it was there by using the rad... |
2 December 2008
10:13 GMT |
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It's a known fact that the Sun will reach a point where it burns its hydrogen and will start swelling as it gets warmer, transforming into a red giant, and that all this will occur in approximately 5 billion years. But first, in about 1.1 billion years, it will become 11% brighter, lifting the Earth's aver... |
23 October 2008
04:16 GMT |
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SuWt 2 is a planetary nebula located in the Centaurus constellation about 6,500 light years away from Earth. It appears as a bright ring of gas with faint lobes perpendicular to the ring, thus giving it the rough look of an hourglass shape. The gas remnant is probably material ejected from a dead star which collapsed... |
4 June 2008
05:03 GMT |
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The vast majority of stars end their lives through supernova explosions while others, more massive, are thought unable to produce such explosions simply because they implode and collapse under their own weight only to produce a black hole. Since these particular types of stellar death don't generate brilliant em... |
10 May 2008
03:44 GMT |
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The Antennae Galaxy is one of the closest and most studied galaxy mergers in the universe. It consists of two gravitationally interacting galaxies dubbed NGC 4038 and NGC 4039 that collided with one another a couple of hundred million years into the past. New observations made by researchers from the European Souther... |
9 May 2008
11:03 GMT |
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Arcturus is the brightest star in the constellation of Boötes and the third brightest star on the night sky after Sirius and Canopus, bearing a visible magnitude of -0.05. It is often regarded as the sixth brightest star, behind Alpha Centauri, Vega and Capella, however it has been shown that Alpha Centauri is a bina... |
25 April 2008
09:41 GMT |
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Planetary nebulae have been first discovered some three centuries ago, but the astronomers of the time, being unable to clearly identify them, named nebulae by attributing them the name of "planetary", mostly because they seemed to have some resemblance to the planet Uranus. In the middle of the 19th century astronom... |
11 March 2008
04:52 GMT |
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Forget about global warming, the ice ages, asteroids or any other impending disaster waiting to happen. Earth will burn! Literally! Astronomers approximate the age of the Sun to a rough 5 billion years and is mostly believed that it will continue to burn hydrogen at least as much time before becoming too unstable to ... |
27 February 2008
02:37 GMT |
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It is generally believed that supernovae usually spread dust into interstellar space as they explode. However, astrophysicists have recently found that this is not always the case, and some might actually collect dust after a supernova phase. These are usually small stars that explode periodically, while gathering cl... |
28 January 2008
09:21 GMT |
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