The Bubble Nebula, also known as NGC 7635, is a sphere of active star formation glowing faintly in the constellation Cassiopeia. The hydrogen gas cloud from which the stars form emits red light, the characteristic color of hydrogen, by absorbing energy from them. This image was made with the 0.8-meter Telescope at McDonald Observatory, with the Prime Focus Corrector instrument. Credit: Tom Montemayor/McDonald Observatory.
bubble neb.tifNew detailed observations from the Habitable Zone Planet Finder on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, as well as NSF’s NOIRLab facilities, reveal a young exoplanet, orbiting a young star in the Hyades cluster, that is unusually dense for its size and age. Slightly smaller than Neptune, K2-25b orbits an M-dwarf star — the most common type of star in the galaxy — every 3.5 days. Credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. Pollard
A - K2-25b-final.tifAn artist's concept of what Kepler-1649c could look like from its surface. Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/Daniel Rutter
An artist's concept of Kepler-1649c orbiting around its host red dwarf star. This newly discovered exoplanet is in its star’s habitable zone and is the closest to Earth in size and temperature found yet in Kepler's data. Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/Daniel Rutter
These two curves show the final distribution of orbit shapes for giant planets and brown dwarfs. The orbital eccentricity determines how elongated the ellipse is, with a value of 0.0 corresponding to a circular orbit and a high value near 1.0 being a flattened ellipse. Gas giant planets located at wide separations from their host stars have low eccentricities, but the brown dwarfs have a wide range of eccentricities similar to binary star systems. For reference, the giant planets in our solar system have eccentricities less than 0.1.Credit: Brendan Bowler (UT-Austin)
By patiently watching giant planets and brown dwarfs orbit their host stars, Bowler and his team were able to constrain the orbit shapes even though only a small portion of the orbit has been monitored. The longer the time baseline, the smaller the range of possible orbits. These plots show nine of the 27 systems from their study. Credit: Brendan Bowler (UT-Austin)
This image of the low-mass brown dwarf GJ 504 B was taken by Bowler and his team using adaptive optics with the NIRC2 camera at Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The image has been processed to remove light from the host star (whose position is marked with an “x”). The companion is located at a separation of about 40 times the Earth-Sun distance and has an orbital period of about 240 years. By returning to this and other systems year after year, the team is able to slowly trace out part of the companion’s orbit to constrain its shape, which provides clues about its formation and history.
White dwarf star in the process of solidifying. (credit: University of Warwick/Mark Garlick)
The spectacular merger of two neutron stars that generated gravitational waves announced last fall likely did something else: birthed a black hole. This newly spawned black hole would be the lowest mass black hole ever found.
After two separate stars underwent supernova explosions, two ultra-dense cores (that is, neutron stars) were left behind. These two neutron stars were so close that gravitational wave radiation pulled them together until they merged and collapsed into a black hole. The illustration (top) shows the two neutron stars spinning around each other while merging.
Image of the planetary-mass companion ROXs 42B b (right, labeled 'b') and its host star (left, labeled 'A'). (Credit: Kraus, A. L. et al. 2014, ApJ, 781, 20)
