The authors of this paper pursued a mechanism which could possibly keep dead galaxies from forming new stars: mass ejected from AGB stars moving through the galaxy could heat the ambient gas.
Sometimes, stellar evolution happens on more human timescales—tens to hundreds of years rather than millions or billions.
How can a star heat up by 40,000 K in just 30 years? Reindl et al. explore the star at the heart of the Stingray Nebula to find out.
This paper looks into the heart of Minkowski’s Butterfly Nebula to answer the question: is there one star or two at work in the formation and evolution of this nebula?
I just vacuumed my apartment and asked the question, ‘how does so much dust accumulate in one week?’ These authors ask a more scientifically interesting question: how can galaxies accumulate more than 100 million solar masses of dust in just a few hundred million years?