Besides being a point of light, a star is a luminous, spherical mass of plasma, enough to hold itself together under its own gravity. On its own, though, gravitational rounding isn't enough. What ...

Learn how the discovery of a young planet orbiting two suns is revealing how worlds form and survive in binary star systems.

From your place inside the Milky Way, you are living within a galaxy that keeps a detailed chemical diary. Every star holds ...

Stars form in massive clouds of gas called molecular clouds. As they form, they accrete gas from these clouds, and as the ...

For decades, astronomers have wondered what the very first stars in the universe were like. These stars formed new chemical elements, which enriched the universe and allowed the next generations of ...

An image of the Milky Way captured by the MeerKAT radio telescope array puts the James Webb Space Telescope’s image of the Sagittarius C region in context. The MeerKAT image spans 1,000 light-years, ...

MUSE survey, an international team of astronomers has inspected a nuclear star cluster of the nearby large spiral galaxy ...

Simulation studies indicate water formation within the first 200 million years of the universe, primarily through supernovae from the first generation of stars. Pair-instability supernovae, occurring ...

Astronomers have identified a rare type of binary star system containing a rapidly spinning millisecond pulsar and a helium star companion, formed via common envelope evolution. Although such systems ...

Luke Keller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. For decades, astronomers have wondered what the very ...