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WR 104: Not The Killer It Used To Be
WR 104. A killer? Not so much. It’s interesting how astronomical harbingers of doom have the ability to pop up more than once on the ‘net. However, the doom isn’t quite as terrifying when you’ve sat...
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Are Brown Dwarfs More Common Than We Thought?
In 2007, a very rare event was observed from Earth by several observers. An object passed in front of a star located near the centre of the Milky Way, magnifying its light. Gravitational lensing is...
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Brown Dwarfs: “Over-Achieving Jupiters” not “Failed Stars”
Why is the term “failed star” synonymous with brown dwarfs? On the one hand, brown dwarfs lack the mass to sustain nuclear fusion in their cores. On the other hand, who said brown dwarfs were trying...
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Life is Grim on the Galactic Rim
The White Star approaches the Shadow’s homeworld of Z’ha’dum on the Galactic Rim. It would appear that scientists have confirmed that the outer edge of the Milky Way is a bad location for life to even...
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Whatever Happened to Hyper-Velocity Star HD 271791?
One scenario: Exploding star flings binary parter away at high velocity (Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics) HC 271791 is a star with a problem, it’s moving so fast through our galaxy that it will...
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Warning, Over-Hyped Title Alert: But It’s A Frackin’ SUPERNOVA!
"SuperNova" by Shadow-Trance (DeviantArt) I’m not kidding, last week was a huge mess of a supernova doomsday circus. It was like whispering “there’s a bomb under your chair” to the person next to you...
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Then Spitzer Imaged Baby Stars in the Orion Nebula…
The Orion Nebula's star-forming region (NASA). Firstly, apologies that it’s been over a month since last posting to Astroengine.com. Call it slacking off, call it a sabbatical, either way, it’s not...
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Hubble Conquers Mystic Mountain
Where is this mystical land? (NASA/ESA/HST). Sometimes, words are not enough to describe views of the universe when captured through the lens of the Hubble Space Telescope. This is one of those...
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Life: Not So Grim On The Galactic Rim?
M80 — an old globular cluster in the Milky Way — is full of metal-poor stars. Do they still have exoplanetary potential? (NASA) The galaxy may be brimming with habitable small worlds and many older...
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Plasmaloopalicious!
The magnetic loop containing hydrogen and nitrogen plasma evolves over 4 micro-seconds. Credit: Bellan & Stenson, 2012 There’s no better method to understand how something works than to build it...
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‘Failed’ Star Rapidly Orbits ‘Dead’ Star in Weird Stellar Pairing
ESO The galaxy may be filled with weird stellar wonders, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a binary system stranger than WD1202-024. First thought to be an isolated white dwarf star approximately 40%...
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Newborn Star Found Growing Inside Magnetic Nest of Chaos
NRAO/AUI/NSF; D. Berry Conventional wisdom would have us believe that stars form in extremely powerful and ordered magnetic fields. But “conventional,” our universe is not (as Yoda might say). In a new...
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TRAPPIST-1: The ‘Habitable’ Star System That’s Probably a Hellhole
Red dwarfs can be angry little stars (NASA/GSFC/S. Wiessinger) There are few places that elicit such vivid thoughts of exotic habitable exoplanets than TRAPPIST-1 — a star system located less than 40...
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Sorry, Proxima Centauri Is Probably a Hellhole, Too
The surface of Proxima b as imagined in this artist’s impression. Sadly, the reality probably doesn’t include an atmosphere (ESO/M. Kornmesser) The funny thing about habitable zones is that they’re not...
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Primordial Black Holes Might be Cosmic Gold Diggers
Neutron stars might have black hole parasites in their cores (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center) When the universe’s first black holes appeared is one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics. Were...
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How Gravitational Waves Led Us to Neutron Star Gold
Artist impression of a violent neutron star collision (Dana Berry, SkyWorks Digital, Inc.) One hundred and thirty million years ago in a galaxy 130 million light-years away, two neutron stars met their...
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Wonky Star Systems May Be Born That Way
A nearby baby star has been discovered with a warped protoplanetary disk — a feature that may reveal the true nature of the solar system’s planetary misalignments [RIKEN] Textbook descriptions of our...
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How Is Stardust Created? #TRIUMFology
I worked on TRIUMF’s Five-Year Plan (2020-2025) last year, so Astroengine is featuring a few physicsy articles that were included in the document to tell the center’s story When (neutron) stars...
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This Weird Star System Is Flipping Awesome
The binary system observed by ALMA isn’t wonky, it’s the first example of a polar protoplanetary disk Artwork of the system HD 98000. This is a binary star comprising two sun-like components,...
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Psychedelic Simulation Showcases the Ferocious Power of a Solar Flare
Scientists are closing in on a better understanding about how these magnetic eruptions evolve [Mark Cheung, Lockheed Martin, and Matthias Rempel, NCAR] For the first time, scientists have created a...
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