On and On They Spin
Nothing sits still in our Universe. Like planets, stars rotate. The authors of this paper found certain types of stars unexpectedly display rapid rotations when they are not supposed to.
Nothing sits still in our Universe. Like planets, stars rotate. The authors of this paper found certain types of stars unexpectedly display rapid rotations when they are not supposed to.
Black holes are found in most galaxies. Observations suggest that they correlate with various properties of their host galaxies. Does this correlation hold in the very early Universe, particularly in galaxies hosting supermassive black holes? The answer is ….
We thought we know our Sun well, since it’s one of the most heavily and closely studied astrophysical objects. Nevertheless, certain aspects of the Sun still linger out of our grasp.
First, we’re told that all stars in a star cluster have the same age. Then, various observations tell us that they don’t. Now, we’re being told that despite those observations, star clusters might actually be single-aged after all.
Astronomers use models to derive properties of individual stars that we cannot directly observe, such as mass, age, and radius. This is also the case for a group of stars (a galaxy or a star cluster). One problem with current stellar population models is that they remain untested for old populations of stars. The authors of this paper devise a new way to test models of old stellar populations.