Browsing all posts in Stars.

Falling out of a Cluster: The history of the Sun

One of my favorite things to do with students in the late fall is to take them outside and point first to the Orion nebula, then to the Pleiades, and finally to the Hyades cluster, saying “these are snap shots in the evolution of open clusters.” Each of these systems is the home of [...]

BAA / AAVSO Day 2: Novae & Supernovae for all

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 [...]

AAVSO/BAA Day 1: Binary Adventures

Variable stars come in many forms – there are happy little regular stars, widely separated and merrily circling ones dancing an eon long dance. Some white dwarfs – dead stars, cooling into stellar embers of stars – become vampires as they gravitationally suck mass from their companion and heat themselves back out of the stellar [...]

AAVSO/BAA Day 1: Paula and Pulsating White Dwarfs

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 [...]

Star Formation in the Center of the Galaxy

I saw a really cool paper (to me) on the pre-print server today. Astronomers Kuzic et al. have made detailed measurements of two groups objects in the center of the galaxy within half a parsec of the center of the Milky Way. These objects, named IRS 13E and IRS 13N (aren’t those exciting names?) are [...]

Tau Boo Back Flips (magnetically)

As some of you may know, my favorite favorite star to bring up when discussing binaries is Tau Boo B (Go ahead, say it out loud. Giggle. Join me in the giggling. Wasn’t that fun?). This little red dwarf star is the companion star to the much more famous, but no where near as fun [...]

Cepheid + Light Echo = Accurate Distances

I am so so frustrated that I can’t get the full journal article associated with this press release. I’m going to have to do some emailing tomorrow to see if someone can get it to me.
Here is what has me excited. In a new paper in Astronomy and Astrophysics (which my Uni doesn’t get) with [...]

4 stars within 6 AU

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 [...]

Type 1a Supernoave: A Non-Standard Candle

One of the most exciting discoveries of astronomy in recent years was the measurement of an acceleration term in the universe’s rate of expansion. Announced by both the Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the High-z Supernova Search Team, these results at once confirmed one another an revolutionized how astronomers view [...]

Giants and Dwarfs with Barium

I’m beginning to think that a large fraction of the astronomical community is in pre-semester stars chaos. The number of press releases has radically slowed, and the journal articles just don’t seem to be flying as fast and furious as normal. Admittedly, this is a personal impression, and while I have data to support the [...]