Events

Death March Of The Planets Strange things happen among the stars--amazing, unforeseen, and bewildering behavior that both baffles and bewitches those who try to understand the long-held secrets lost in starlight. Mysteries are fun, and solving them can provide an unsurpassed delight. One of the most mesmerizing of stellar mysteries is the weird behavior of parent-stars that swallow their own planetary-offspring, as one by one--in a hideous death march of the planets--these doomed worlds spiral fatally inward, and then finally into, the fiery furnaces of their roiling, broiling parent-stars. In classical mythology, the Titan Kronos devoured his own children, including Hades (Pluto), Poseidon (Neptune), and three daughters. Some stars behave like ancient gods. In October and December 2017, two separate teams of astronomers announced that they have found clues that certain stellar parents display tattle-tale evidence of their terrible feast, showing signs of having devoured their own trag...

How Our Solar System Formed: The Answer Is Blowin' In The Wind Our solitary Sun blasts our daytime sky with its shimmering fires, sending both welcoming warmth and light to Earth. Our Sun, and its familiar family of planets, moons, and smaller objects, emerged about 4.56 billion years ago from jumbled relics left over from the now-dead, nuclear-fusing furnaces of ancient stars that have long since vanished--their light was switched off forever when they ran out of their necessary supply of fuel to keep them searing-hot and shining. Our Sun, as well as other stars, are born within the swirling, whirling depths of one of the many beautiful, dark, and cold molecular clouds that roam through our Milky Way Galaxy in huge numbers. When a dense pocket tucked within the undulating whorls of one of these eerie clouds collapses, under the merciless pull of its own relentless gravity, a new star is born. Yet, despite the many new discoveries scientists have made about our mysterious Cosmos, m...

Galaxies And The Supermassive Black Holes They Host In the deepest, darkest hearts of perhaps every large galaxy in the Universe, including our own Milky Way, supermassive black holes lie in secret, waiting for their dinner--a wrecked star, perhaps, or a cloud of tragic gas. These gravitational beasts are some of the strangest occupants of the Cosmic zoo, and they possess almost unimaginable masses of millions to billions of times that of our Sun. Over the years, astronomers have come to the realization that these enormous black holes are inexorably linked to the galaxies that house them--hidden as they are within the brilliant, ferocious glare of an encircling accretion disk, made from the ruthlessly tattered objects that compose their terrible feasts. Indeed, these greedy gravitational monsters appear to have a direct correlation to the galaxies that shelter them, and researchers have calculated that the mass of these strange objects show a constant relation to their galactic hosts. ...

The Most Mysterious Star In The Universe May Not Be So Mysterious Mysteries are fun to solve, and some stars can lead perplexed scientific detectives on a merry chase to solve their myriad mesmerizing mysteries. Such a puzzling star is KIC 8462852, frequently referred to as Tabby's Star or Royajian's Star. This strange stellar inhabitant of our Milky Way Galaxy is an F-type main-sequence star situated in the constellation Cygnus (The Swan), which is approximately 1,280 light-years from Earth. Weird fluctuations in the light streaming out from Tabby's Star were discovered by citizen astronomers as part of the Planet Hunter's project, and, in September 2015, an enticing interpretation of these mysterious fluctuations suggested the possible existence of an alien megastructure orbiting this undeniably bewitching star. Alas, the true explanation may be somewhat less dramatic, though certainly fascinating in its own right. In January 2018, a team of more than 100 astronomers ...

Galaxies On The Edge Glittering like a trillion fireflies on a summer's night, the galaxies of the Universe host a swarming multitude of dazzling stars, and these stellar performers do their strange cosmic dance within an invisible structure called the Great Cosmic Web. This enormous web-like structure is woven of extremely massive, transparent filaments that are lit by flecks of brilliant starlight. The heavy filaments of the Great Cosmic Web surround almost-empty, very black, cavernous, and barren Voids, that contain relatively few galaxies. Indeed, on the largest scales, the entire Universe looks the same wherever we observe it, displaying a foamy, bubbly appearance. Voids commonly have sizes of hundreds of millions of light-years, and account for about 90% of known Space. In January 2018, a team of astronomers released their new observations of galaxies growing up on the edge of a Void. These lonely galaxies, on the edge, serve as effective natural laboratories for studying the...

Tiny, Tiny Failed Star: How We Wonder What You Are Bewitching, bewildering brown dwarfs are genuine "oddballs"--and their existence in the Universe presents astronomers with an intriguing mystery to solve. This is because these stellar "failures" challenge the neat distinction between true stars and giant planets. Brown dwarfs are substellar objects that occupy a mass-range between the heaviest gas-giant planets--such as our own Solar System's banded behemoth Jupiter--and the lightest of true stars, which are red dwarfs. Unlike true stars--like our Sun--these tiny, tiny brown dwarfs are not massive enough to sustain nuclear fusion, which is the process that lights a true star's fires--and causes them to send their light shining through the Universe. In January 2018, astronomers said that they are hopeful that NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST's) powerful infrared capacity will resolve a puzzle as mesmerizing as age-old observatio...