The Lives of the Longest Lived Stars
Heavy stars live like rock stars: they live fast, become big, and die young. Low mass stars, on the other hand, are more persistent, and live longer. Fusing hydrogen slow and steady wins the stellar age-race.
Discovering the mysterious companions of Cepheids
Cepheids are bright enough that we can use them to measure distances to other galaxies, but their luminosities also makes detecting their companions particularly difficult. So how do astronomers find their uncover their secret partners? Today’s paper takes a look…
Falling stones paint it black
Mercury is the smallest planet in the Solar System, but some of its properties are a big challenge to explain. Today’s Astrobite presents a solution to one of these issues: The darkening of Mercury is induced by a high abundance of carbon delivered by meteorites.
The Magnetic Personalities Of Dead Stars
The galaxy is littered with white dwarfs, the burnt out remnants of stars that have run out of hydrogen fuel in their cores, but were too small to explode as supernovae. But far from being lifeless orbs, around a tenth of white dwarfs have powerful magnetic fields, a million times stronger than that of the Sun. How did these magnetic white dwarfs become such strong magnets? And just how many are there. The authors of this paper set out to answer the second of these questions, in the hope that it would shed light on the first.
Using observations from home to improve the transit method
Most exoplanets are and have been detected by the transit method. Maybe, we can improve the method even further by drawing conclusions from the recent Venus transits in 2004 and 2012.
ESPRESSO: A scientific Pandora’s box
Are you on the lookout to see if there are habitable planets are out there? Or do you want to see how or if physical ‘constants’ have varied with time? Why not design a versatile instrument capable at tackling a wealth of outstanding questions in astronomy: a sort of a “scientific pandora’s box” for extremely high precision astronomical research? This is where ESPRESSO comes in…