Stars

The nearest white dwarf to us, Sirius B, has the mass of the Sun but the size of the Earth. For comparison, the Sun is over 100 times wider than Earth. Credit: ESA and NASA
Meet G117-B15A: the most stable optical clock in the Universe
Phil Plait
Trending on SYFY WIRE in Stars
Tag: Bad Astronomy
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Tag: Exoplanets
Tag: Supernova
Tag: white dwarfs

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A planet for Vega?
Phil Plait
Artwork of a gas giant planet orbiting very close to a star more massive and hotter than the Sun. The planet is losing its atmosphere due to the intense influx of light and heat from the star. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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The red hypergiant VY CMa is bigger than Betelgeuse and belching out vast clouds of dust
Phil Plait
Mar 5, 2021
Artwork depicting the star VY Canis Majoris erupting out huge clouds of dust. Credit: NASA, ESA, and R. Humphreys (University of Minnesota), and J. Olmstead (STScI)
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Cygnus X-1, the first black hole ever detected, is more massive than we thought
Phil Plait
Feb 19, 2021
Artwork of the Cygnus X-1 system. Off to the left is a massive O-star over 40 times the mass of the Sun. Orbiting around it is a black hole with a mass of 21 times the Sun’s, feeding off of material from the star and blasting out X-rays. Credit: Internati
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Can a planet be bigger than its star?
Phil Plait
Feb 17, 2021
Artwork depicting the white dwarf WD 1856 and its massive planet, far larger than the star itself. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
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Black holes swarm in the core of a globular cluster
Phil Plait
Feb 12, 2021
Artwork based on a real Hubble observation of NGC 6397 showing black holes swarming in its core. Credit: ESA/Hubble, N. Bartmann
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Ancient star, ancient planets… ancient life? Well…
Phil Plait
Feb 2, 2021
Artwork of an ultrahot terrestrial planet, orbiting close enough to its host star that the surface is molten. Credit: Getty Images / Mark Garlick, Science Photo Library
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Marshmallow world: WASP-107b is a superpuff planet with a weirdly tiny core
Phil Plait
Jan 19, 2021
Artwork of the extreme superpuff planet WASP-107b, which has such a low mass it’s about as dense as a marshmallow. Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, M. Kornmesser
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Tag: Supernova
Tasting neutrinos: Flavor changing in the cores of exploding stars
Phil Plait
Jan 12, 2021
A stunning image of the supernova remnant Cas A combines visible light images from Hubble with X-ray observations by Chandra. The different colors represent different energies of the light.
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Tag: Gaia
The star cluster that wasn't: How did M73 fool generations of astronomers?
Phil Plait
Dec 18, 2020
The “cluster” M73, a collection of a half-dozen or so stars in the constellation of Aquarius. Credit: ALADIN / DSS
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Black dwarf supernovae: The last explosions in the Universe
Phil Plait
Dec 16, 2020
Artwork depicting a black dwarf in the far-flung future; a dead star that was once like the Sun. This is somewhat fanciful; by the time black dwarfs exist all the stars in the Universe should be dead as well. Credit: Baperookamo / Wikimedia Commons / Crea
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Gaia's map of the sky — with two *billion* stars
Phil Plait
Dec 4, 2020
This is not a photo! It’s an all-sky map of 1.8 billion stars in our galaxy, created from Gaia data showing the stars’ positions, brightnesses, and colors. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO. Acknowledgement: A. Moitinho
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Tag: Nebula
What created this eerie blue eye in space? Stellar cannibalism.
Phil Plait
Nov 18, 2020
GALEX ultraviolet observations of the Blue Ring Nebula (in blue) together with ground-based observations in visible light (pink) finally reveal the true nature of this object: Two stars that merged into one, blowing out a wind shaped like two thick conica
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A blast of radiation reveals a nearby cold brown dwarf
Phil Plait
Nov 10, 2020
Artwork depicting a magnetic brown dwarf; particles moving along the field lines hit the atmosphere and cause it to glow with an aurora. Credit: ASTRON/Danielle Futselaar
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What do 10 *million* stars look like?
Phil Plait
Oct 28, 2020
A subsection of the survey image (near the center top) shows stars in a cluster near a dense pocket of opaque interstellar dust.
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Want to visit 2 million stars? There’s a shortcut, but you’ll need a warp drive
Elizabeth Rayne
Oct 20, 2020
Milky Way star tour visualization
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