stars

A team of astronomers from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (USA) has discovered, thanks to the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA), what appears to be the first known globular cluster about to germinate. It is an extremely massive cloud of molecular gas (it has 50 million times the mass of the Sun) but without the presence of stars. The study has been published in the Astrophysical Journal.

A team of astronomers led by Stephan Geier from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching (Germany) has discovered a star that moves at an unparalleled speed: about 1,200 kilometers per second, a speed so high that it has broken the record of speed in our galaxy. The finding has been published in the journal Science.

The supernova that we can see in the image exploded more than 9,000 million years ago and, thanks to the NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope, a team of astronomers from the University of California at Berkeley (USA) has been able to observe by first time in history, four different images of the explosion of this star.

An international team of astrophysicists has managed to capture a unique event in astronomy: the birth of a quadruple star system in the constellation of Perseus that represents one of the 48 constellations of Ptolemy and is also one of the 88 modern constellations (and also where they come from the famous Perseids).

In the Milky Way alone there could be hundreds of billions of planets similar to Earth, capable of supporting life. That is what emerges from the calculations made by a team of planetary scientists from the Australian National University from data obtained on the more than a thousand ex-worlds that have been discovered by NASA's Kepler space telescope.

A scientific study, carried out by a team of experts from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, has determined that being born at a time of low solar activity is equivalent to a greater probability of living longer (up to five more years on average); on the contrary, being born in a highly active solar cycle reduces our life expectancy. The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

What effect would the passage of a wandering star have in the vicinity of the Solar System? A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heilderberg (Germany) has calculated the possible consequences for Earth. The study has been published on arXiv.org, an online repository of Cornell University (USA) for pre-publications of scientific articles in the fields of mathematics, physics, computer science or quantitative biology.

Scientists from the University of Strasbourg and the University of Louisiana have discovered a black hole that is swallowing a nearby star ten times faster than experts have previously thought possible.