The word Novae generally refers to a “New Star,” or a “Guest Star” - An object that springs up in the sky quite suddenly as a new but non-permanent object. Today we give these non permanent sky features a dozen or more names: Supernovae (types I & II with all sorts of extra letters), Recurrent […]

After several days of travel, I’ve settled into the front row of the BAA/AAVSO meeting in New Hall, in Cambridge, UK. Dr. Paula Skody is giving an excellent talk on pro-am collaboration to make Hubble Space Telescope observations of cataclysmic variables. She studies pulsating white dwarfs - stars whose outer 99% have oscillations that […]

This will be my last post from the actual physical location of the American Astronomical Society meeting; I’ve preloaded this entry to go up when I’ll be on a plane winging it back to Boulder. I’ll have some wrap-up stuff later (oh, just you wait) but since I’m heading back, I want to leave you […]

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When I worked on Hubble data, lo these many years ago, some of the most fun […]

 
Astronomers think that many star systems actually contain multiple stars. There are doubles, triples and even quadruple groupings of stars locked together in a gravitational embrace. Astronomers recently discovered a system with 4 stars orbiting within the orbit of Jupiter. It’s a surprising discovery considering no telescope on Earth is powerful enough to separate them […]

The universe keeps throwing neat stuff up for our telescopes to look at. A team lead by Evgenya Shkolnik (University of Hawaii), has observed a tight system of 4 stars crammed within 6 AU of one another - If located in our solar system, all four stars would fit within the orbit of Jupiter! The […]

Look out in the sky today, and you’ll see only a few kinds of galaxies. Most are elliptical, fuzzy round blobs containing billions of stars. Others are spirals, of course, flattened disks with magnificent spiral arms. Others are irregular in shape, and the fourth kind are peculiar; they have a definite shape (rings, for example) […]

When a star explodes, the expanding gas, will, over thousands and even tens of thousands of years, mix with the pre-existing gas between the stars. When it does, they interact and form sheets, ribbons and filaments.
Can’t imagine it? Good thing the National Optical Astronomy Observatory has a gorgeous picture of it:

This image shows just one […]