By the 1900s, physicists gave us an understanding of the relationship between the color of light a star gives off and its temperature. The coolest stars (with surface temperatures of about 2 000 K) glow dim red, while higher temperature stars glow orange, yellow, white and blue.
No Irish
It’s St. Patrick’s day, and that means many will celebrate their Irish heritage and wear the green. But stars never wear the green. You will never see a green star.
Mellow Yellow
A new paper in Astronomy and Astrophysics heralds the discovery of a yellow hypergiant star known as HR 5171. Such stars are exceedingly rare, with only 12 such stars known to exist within our galaxy.
Out of Beta
Observations from the ALMA telescope array has made some interesting observations of carbon monoxide in the vicinity of the star Beta Pictoris. The results have been published recently in Science, and it tells an interesting story about comets and planetary formation.
Centrifuge
IRAS 04368+2557 is a protostar about 450 light years from us. It is a particularly young protostar, at about 300,000 years. Because of its age and proximity, it provides an excellent opportunity to study the early stages of stellar and planetary formation.
Second Generation
A new star has been discovered that was born from the very first stars of the universe. We can identify it by its particularly low metallicity.
Speed!
New hypervelocity stars have been discovered. We’ve discovered fast moving stars before, but these are different because they aren’t coming from the center of our galaxy. They are a bit of a mystery, because we aren’t entirely sure how that could gain such high speeds.
Superhump
What’s a superhump? And what has it got to do with astronomy? It all has to do with binary stars. Specifically a binary system where one of the stars (usually a white dwarf) is capturing material from the other.
Destiny
The evolution of a star depends mainly upon its mass. There are other factors such as metallicity that can affect a star’s evolution, but the main factor is mass. It is the mass of a star that determines its destiny.