When it comes to habitability for Earth-like life, we’ve got more than just liquid water to worry about. Today’s astrobite looks at how planets could lose portions of their atmospheres to quasar radiation.
In Be/X-ray binaries — systems in which a Be star spins so fast that it throws its own matter away towards its neutron star companion — it’s possible for accretion discs to form that spin backwards. What does this mean for the stars?
Astronomers have found hydrogen contamination in the atmospheres of helium white dwarfs – but where in the world/universe is it coming from?! The authors of today’s astrobite perform statistical tests to see if the source of this pesky hydrogen could be water-bearing rocky bodies out in space.
A star that spins fast enough to throw off its atmosphere, and a hint at how it got that way.
Five young stars in one system — all the same age but at different stages of their evolution. What can they tell us?
As smaller galaxies collide with our own they’re slowly torn apart. By watching how they spread across the night’s sky we can infer an incredible amount about the shape of the galaxy and the nature of dark matter.