Understanding how large star clusters form could tell us more about star formation when the universe was young

Tonight we’ll journey to the truly titanic 30 Doradus nebula (also called the Tarantula nebula), 170 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, aboard the Hubble Space Telescope. The Large Magellanic Cloud is a smaller satellite galaxy to the Milky Way, where astronomers recently discovered something they suspected about the formation of larger star clusters.

Space News

Thursday, December 29, 2011 – Astronomers once believed that stars with a mass over 25 times that of our own sun would eventually become black holes. Astronomers are presently reassessing this belief in light of new evidence suggesting magnetars with a mass as much as 40 times that of our sun exist amidst the pulsar zoo. Magnetars are neutron stars with magnetic fields a million billion times as powerful as the one surrounding Earth. Presently a...

Take a look at the night sky above you and name a few of the celestial objects you know in your head. Would you like to leave your name written in the annals of astronomy and human history? One of the greatest honours for an astronomer is to have their name adorn a celestial body in the night sky. Look up into the night sky and many of the stellar bodies you see will have been named in honour of their discoverer, a f...

Cycles of Life

Astrophysicists studying stars use the closest star to Earth as their main test subject, Sol. Astronomers met recently during the American Astronomical Society meeting on May 26 in Miami to discuss the usefulness and reliability of three new techniques being used by current solar scientists to delve into the mysteries of the sun. "Scientists hope these three new techniques will help them predict the future behavior of Sol and jet streams, r...