Scienceblogtwo

According to astronomers, planets are born in protoplanetary disks, which are the rings of gas and dust that encircle newly formed, young stars. Even though the universe has hundreds of these disks, it has been challenging to observe genuine planetary birth and development in these settings. A new method for finding these elusive young planets has now been devised by astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and with it, "smoking gun" proof of a small Neptune- or Saturn-like planet lurking in a disk. The Astrophysical Journal Letters today published a description of the findings. According to Feng Long, a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Astrophysics and project leader, "directly finding young planets is highly tough and has thus far only been effective in one or two situations." Because they are encased in substantial amounts of gas and dust, planets are always too dim for us to see them. Instead, they must look for signs that a ...

The universe is carved by stars, yet their formation is still largely unknown to science. Researchers looked to the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, to better comprehend the frenetic "baby boom" of star creation that took place early in the history of the universe. This close galaxy resembles galaxies discovered in the earlier cosmos, when heavy metals were more abundant, since it has a simpler chemical makeup than the Milky Way. As a result, it can stand in for the early universe. Recent research using the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope both reached the same conclusion. The diverse teams discovered young stars spiraling into the core of the large star cluster NGC 346 in the Small Magellanic Cloud using various techniques. According to researchers, the migration of gas and stars like a river is an effective technique to promote star formation. The team's findings demonstrate that the Sma...

After a star exhausts its hydrogen fuel for nuclear fusion and starts to die, a red giant emerges. The delicate interplay between a star's inherent gravitational pull and the pressure from continuing thermonuclear fusion reactions at its core allows stars to remain stable. That balance is destroyed when a star's core runs out of hydrogen, and the core starts to collapse. The plasma shell that surrounds the core heats up enough to start fusing hydrogen as the core collapses. The star's outer layers dramatically expand as fusion in this shell starts, and the surface can grow up to several hundred times larger than the star's original size. The swollen surface of the star cools and changes color from white or yellow to red as the energy at its surface dissipates much more. A red giant develops. It may take hundreds of millions of years for this process to complete. It only applies to stars of intermediate mass (80% to 800% of the mass of the Sun or less), which go on to ge...