Softpedia
 

NEWS CATEGORIES:



NEWS ARCHIVE >>
SOFTPEDIA REVIEWS >>
MEET THE EDITORS >>
TRENDING TODAY
Home > News > Tags > stars

Stories about: stars


More: next 50 >>

Dung Beetles Navigate Using the Stars, Milky Way

Dung beetles aren't the most respected of creatures, for obvious reasons, yet they are quite resourceful critters and, it turns out, quite the able navigators. Scientists have been wondering how the small insects were able to keep going in a straight line while rolling their, umm, prize even at night.Some scient...

24 January 2013
16:52 GMT

Get Solar 2 for Steam on Linux with a 75% Discount

Solar 2, a sand-box game set in an infinite abstract universe in which the player is able to control planets and stars, is now available on Steam with a huge discount of 75%. Solar 2 is not your average sand box game. The players start as a simple asteroid, cruising around the galaxy and soon enough it evolves into ...

8 January 2013
17:01 GMT

Clouds and Stars Above Volcanic Island Breathtakingly Presented in Time-Lapse Video

Austrian photographer Christoph Malin's work “Island in the sky” is an astonishing time-lapse video made out of images taken off the telescopes at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory. It took Malin over one year to complete his project, meanwhile his lifestyle was turning into a camping-observatory o...

27 November 2012
04:53 GMT

Canadian Scientists Discover Orbitless Planet

Researchers at the University of Montreal have discovered a giant corpus wandering by itself among the stars of the AB Doradus Moving Group, Weekly Voice reports. According to the commonly accepted definitions, all planets must revolve around stars. Nevertheless, the idea that certain planets might have detached the...

15 November 2012
05:58 GMT

95 Percent of All Stars to Ever Exist Have Already Been Created

The rate at which new stars are being produced is dropping. Every modern model of the universe predicts this, it's also common sense, there's only so much hydrogen in the universe, all the stars are using it up and it will eventually all be consumed by fusion. With not enough hydrogen to go around, no new...

7 November 2012
17:41 GMT

Nearby Star Is Surrounded by a Cloud of Comets

Using the European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel Space Telescope, a team of astronomers was recently able to determine that a nearby star called Beta Pictoris, located around 63 light-years away from Earth, is surrounded by a thick cloud of comets. The stellar object is very young, and it is still surrounded b...

4 October 2012
08:57 GMT

Highest Possible Temperature Explained [Video]

A new, 10-minute video from Michael at Vsauce highlights just how hot objects can become. In fact, this short presentation indicates the maximum temperature something can achieve within the current laws of physics, before becoming something else. In fact, our current understanding of the laws of physics does not ex...

2 October 2012
04:54 GMT

Stellar Explosions Influence Temperatures in Earth's Atmosphere

Dr. Charles Wang, an astrophysicist at the University of Aberdeen, proposes a new theory on why stars explode. Other than providing the potential key to one of the most mysterious events in the Universe, the theory could also shed more light on the link between supernova events and climate change. According to a pre...

5 September 2012
08:29 GMT

Video Depicts Supernova Progenitor Star System

A team of experts from the multi-institutional Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) survey announces, in the August 24 issue of the top journal Science, the discovery of the first Type Ia supernova progenitor star system. The video above details how the binary structure will eventually blow up. Called PTF 11kx, the syst...

24 August 2012
03:42 GMT

Stellar Clusters Imaged as They Begin to Merge

One of the latest images collected using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows two stellar clusters in a nearby galaxy as they are beginning to collide with each other. The snapshot captures both structures at a rare moment, when they are only just starting to rip each other apart. Many of the stars in the two ...

17 August 2012
08:56 GMT

Star-Watchers Now Party at the Grand Canyon

Presently, the Grand Canyon national park is housing a not-at-all-exclusive Star Party, an event where amateur astronomers bring their home-made or purchased telescopes and offer to share information about the cosmos with regular folks. Besides being presented with the chance to look through a telescope at Saturn o...

19 June 2012
04:04 GMT

Dust-Emitting Star Found by WISE Telescope

Astronomers say that one of the stars they discovered during a 2010 survey of the night sky is currently spraying large amounts of dust into its surrounding area. We may be witnessing the process through which stars seed the Universe with the building blocks of other stars, planets or life. It is well known that hyd...

27 April 2012
03:12 GMT

Runaway Planets Can Find New Homes Around Other Stars

According to the conclusions of a new study conducted by experts at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), it would appear that extrasolar planets ejected from their original star systems can be captured in orbit around other stars; and this is not a rare occurrence. Researchers indicate that millio...

18 April 2012
04:58 GMT

Countless Comets Destroyed Around Fomalhaut Each Day

Officials with the European Space Agency (ESA) say that the Herschel Space Observatory – the world's most advanced telescope – has recently observed the area around the star Fomalhaut. The team behind the study found that thousands of icy comets are destroyed there every single day. Previous observ...

12 April 2012
04:47 GMT

How Middleweight Stars Shed Their Mass Before Dying

In a paper published in the April 12 issue of the top scientific journal Nature, experts propose a new explanation for how stars of moderate weight manage to shed more than half of their mass, as they reach the end of their burning cycle. What researchers observed when surveying medium-weight stars was that the obje...

12 April 2012
03:36 GMT

Half a Billion Stars Visible in New WISE Catalog

After processing more than 15 trillion bytes of data, astronomers at the American space agency were finally able to compile an atlas and catalog of the entire infrared sky. Released on March 14, the dataset features more than 18,000 individual images. NASA experts say that the catalog part of the dataset covers aro...

15 March 2012
03:44 GMT

The Sun Is a Comet Thief

According to the results of a new scientific investigation, it would appear that the Sun may have stolen a large number of comets from nearby stars. It is now estimated that around 5 percent of the bodies in the Oort Cloud did not form in the solar system. Though very difficult to confirm with standard observations ...

29 February 2012
02:44 GMT

Detecting a Primordial Black Hole As It Collides with a Star

A new series of computer simulations conducted by investigators at Princeton University and the New York University (NYU) reveals that dark matter could potentially form when a primordial black hole – a relic from the time of the Big Bang – passes through a star. With these models, researchers tried to ...

21 February 2012
05:04 GMT

What Makes a Star's Surroundings Habitable

Studies published thus far have provided sufficient arguments that life as we know it would have the highest chances of emerging on planets located in their star's habitable zones. These are areas around each star where temperatures are right to support liquid water. A new study now shows that chemistry also pla...

2 February 2012
11:55 GMT

The Fastest Rotating Star Ever Found

VFTS 102 is the fastest-rotating star ever discovered, no doubt about it. At an average speed of 1 million miles (1.61 million kilometers) per hour, it spins about 100 times faster than our own star. The object was recently identified in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way in close ...

29 December 2011
10:40 GMT

Hubble Sees Impressive Star Cluster in Neighboring Galaxy

A recent survey of the Large Magellanic Cloud – one of the largest dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way – yielded an impressive image of the globular star cluster NGC 1846. The formation contains tens of thousands of stars spread out over a large portion of space. The cluster is located in the LMC'...

22 November 2011
10:47 GMT

NASA Shows Earliest Stars Were Smaller Than Suggested

According to the conclusions of a new computer simulation carried out by researchers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, it would appear that the earliest stars in the Universe were not as massive as previous studies suggested. Until now, astronomers believed that the first stars to form...

11 November 2011
02:59 GMT

Stars May Create Organic Matter Naturally

A group of investigators from the University of Hong Kong announce the discovery of organic molecules in interstellar dust, confirming predictions made some time ago that stars are able to produce organic compounds naturally. Interstellar dust, as the name suggests, can be found throughout the Universe, but it is es...

27 October 2011
06:25 GMT

'Vampire' Stars Finally Reveal Their Secrets

A group of astronomers at the Northwestern University may have finally figured out why is it that stars called blue straggler appear to be getting younger with time. Usually, these objects are found siphoning matter off their companions, which is why they are also called vampire stars. One thing that separates these...

20 October 2011
10:32 GMT

Earliest Galaxies May Be Older Than Thought

Scientists with the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge announce the discovery of very old stars inside the earliest galaxies known to have formed in the Universe. The discovery seems to hint that the galaxies themselves are in reality a lot older than first estimated. Team leader Dan Stark says that some of the ...

26 September 2011
14:21 GMT

First Exoplanet Found Around Binary System

A group of astronomers including investigators from the Carnegie Institution for Science (CIS), in Washington, DC, announces the discovery of the first extrasolar planet found orbiting around a binary star system. The two stars are located very close to each other. From the surface of the newly-discovered planet, c...

16 September 2011
03:11 GMT

Determining the Inner Workings of Delta Scuti Stars

A team of astronomers recently conducted a new study on a Delta Scuti star, a member of a class of special, pulsating celestial objects that can reach two solar masses. The work uncovered a previously-unsuspected process acting near the core of the star, influencing its appearance. Solar physicists, in general, d...

15 September 2011
04:31 GMT

Coolest Stars Are as Warm as Human Bodies

Astronomers investigating data collected by an infrared telescope operated by NASA recently discovered the existence of the coolest class of stars in the Universe. These objects appear to have temperature levels comparable to those of the human body.Data to support this idea were collected by the NASA Wide-field Infr...

24 August 2011
03:02 GMT

Some 1.2 Percent of Milky Way Stars Can Support Life

Astrobiologists recently released a new map of the Milky Way, which shows that about 1.2 percent of all stars in our galaxy are capable of supporting complex life in their orbit, or at least were capable of doing so at a given time in the past. Given that the galaxy has billions of stars, 1.2 percent of them could ea...

11 July 2011
10:59 GMT

Dark Matter May Be Essential for Life

Following new discoveries made in a very large galaxy clusters, experts are now proposing that the emergence of life in the Universe would be extremely difficult without the presence of dark matter. The stuff, which can only be detected by analyzing the gravitational influence it exerts on normal, baryonic matter, ma...

23 June 2011
10:00 GMT

Massive Gamma Ray Flash Produced by Dying Star

While analyzing the skies in the direction of the constellation Draco, the Swift Gamma Burst Mission spacecraft discovered a massive gamma-ray flash taking place on March 28. Experts now say that the event was most likely caused by a massive star falling into a black hole. Since the emission was first detected, astro...

17 June 2011
03:46 GMT

New Class of Star Clusters Discovered

A study published in the May 20 issue of the esteemed Astrophysical Journal Letters describes what could very well be a new class of star clusters. Experts say that the object known as NGC 6791 cannot be readily classified in any of the existing stellar cluster types. Up until now, astronomers used to divide any new ...

8 June 2011
11:01 GMT

Starlight Can Tear Stellar Nurseries Apart

Giant molecular clouds make up an extremely small portion of the interstellar medium, and yet they are mainly responsible for the creation of massive numbers of new stars. Recently, astronomers learned that these enormous structures can be destroyed by the very stars they create. The study determined that light emitt...

7 June 2011
03:00 GMT

New Insight into Stellar Evolution

Using state-of-the-art computer simulations, and the latest discoveries on the nature of stars, a team of experts has recently compiled a new model of stellar birth. The work might finally solve some of the mysteries related to the development of star clusters, and to the pattern in which these stars spread.When obse...

2 June 2011
05:05 GMT

Star Three Million Times Brighter than the Sun Found

An international astronomical collaboration managed to discover one of the brightest, most luminous stars in the entire Universe. The object, dubbed VFTS 682, lies in the dwarf galaxy Large Magellanic Cloud, and is around 300 million times brighter than our Sun.While finding super-bright stars is nothing new for astr...

25 May 2011
07:56 GMT

Spin Rates Could Reveal the Age of Stars

Astronomers say that a new method of determining the age of stars will soon be made available to experts around the world. A group of them says that analyzing stellar spin rates could provide useful data for establishing the true age of a given star. In numerous points in the long lives, stars similar to our Sun look...

24 May 2011
11:59 GMT

Experts Finally Calculate the Hoyle State

After trying to do so for more than 50 years, scientists were finally able to calculate the Hoyle state, without which the existence of life would have most likely been impossible. The state applies to carbon, one of the chemicals elements that are indispensable to life.In fact, without this state, it's highly u...

11 May 2011
05:46 GMT

New Model Explains the Movement of Spiral Arms in Galaxies

A researcher in the United Kingdom is now proposing a new model for explaining how the arms of spiral galaxies are moving around the central bulge. The new view is in direct conflict with existing, widely-accepted theories explaining the same phenomenon.The proposal is also seeking to explain how spiral arms evolved ...

3 May 2011
04:48 GMT

Brown Dwarf Systems May Devour Their Exoplanets

Astronomers have recently discovered a small and weird population of stars in a cluster located some 20,000 light-years away from us. They say that these objects look very much like brown dwarfs, but add that something about them doesn't quite make sense. For instance, measurements of the objects conducted in in...

27 April 2011
05:53 GMT

Iran Reports Being Attacked by New Computer Worm

Iranian officials are reporting that government systems have come under attack from a new computer worm, which follows last year's Stuxnet incident.The announcement was made by Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali, the leader of Iran's Passive Defense Organisation, a military unit responsible for defending ...

26 April 2011
13:00 GMT

Sculptor Galaxy Reveals Really Old Star

Astronomers have recently made an incredible discovery, when they managed to discover a very old star in a nearby dwarf galaxy called Sculptor. The object is located about 290,000 light-years away from Earth, and its presence there holds several important implications for science. One of them is that the Milky Way de...

26 April 2011
03:52 GMT

Stellar Nursery Reveals Solar Prominences-Like Gas Loops

Investigators with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) recently managed to snap an interesting view of the stellar nursery called NGC 3582, which is located in the larger RCW 57 star-forming region of the Milky Way. The new image reveals interesting structures within the gas clouds. The tendrils the ESO team obse...

14 April 2011
10:13 GMT

First Galaxies Formed 200 Million Years After Big Bang

The results of a new scientific study suggest that the earliest galaxies ever to develop within the Universe appeared about 200 million years after the Big Bang exploded everything into being. If this is true, then these findings are in direct violation of established cosmological models, which show that the earliest...

14 April 2011
08:37 GMT

White Dwarfs Caught Merging, Forming New Star

After having lived full lives, the two components of a binary white dwarf system are now in the process of merging with each other. This will result in the formation of a new star, which will then go on to live a second full life.The discovery was made by a team ODF experts led by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astro...

8 April 2011
07:30 GMT

Kepler Helps Clear Multiple Star Mysteries

Since the launch of the Kepler Telescope, NASA managed to find more than a thousand exoplanetary candidates, demonstrating that planet-hunting observatories are indeed capable of finding new worlds around other stars. But recently, Kepler proved it can take on multiple roles and types of studies. Two new researches s...

8 April 2011
02:59 GMT

Explaining Why Medium-Class Stars Produce X-rays

Scientists have taken the first steps towards understanding the reason why the late B to mid A classes of stars emit radiation in the X-ray portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, when they shouldn't theoretically be capable of doing this. Most types of main sequence stars produce these radiations, and, in some...

25 March 2011
09:12 GMT

NASA Begins 100-Year Starship Project

The American space agency has a new and simple plan – to become capable of flying among the stars by 2100. Working together with a Pentagon agency, NASA has already began the study phase for the 100-Year Starship project.Flying to other stars is not a very easy task, and there are monumental challenges to be su...

23 March 2011
09:41 GMT

Help Needed to Create a Map of Global Light Pollution

Throughout the highly-urbanized world, one of the most severe problems today is the lack of starlight, and even stars for that matter, from the night sky. Light pollution is preventing this light from making its way to us, and experts now want people's help to create a global map of light pollution.The world was...

23 March 2011
03:50 GMT

Stars Prefer ‘Hanging Out’ at Milky Way's Core

A group of investigators has just released a new version of a standard image depicting the core of our galaxy. The new view places an emphasis on determining the number and type of stars that exist near the center of the Milky Way. Even at a brief glance, it becomes apparent that the central regions of the 100,00...

19 March 2011
07:25 GMT

Stellar Tide Effects Harm Potential Habitable Exoplanets

In a new scientific study, a team of astronomers determined that low-mass stars all over the Universe could be preventing extrasolar planets in their orbits from turning into life-supporting environments. New conclusions indicate that the stellar objects exert tremendous tidal forces on their planets, so powerful tha...

3 March 2011
07:37 GMT


More: next 50 >>

WindowsGamesDriversMacLinuxScriptsMobileHandheldNews

SUBMIT PROGRAM   |   ADVERTISE   |   GET HELP   |   SEND US FEEDBACK   |   RSS FEEDS   |   UPDATE YOUR SOFTWARE   |   ROMANIAN FORUM