How to spot the Double Cluster and the Carina Nebula this week

By Abigail Beall Cristian Cestaro/Alamy IN THE northern hemisphere, winter is still with us. That means dark nights and plenty of opportunity to look for fainter targets in the sky. In the southern hemisphere, nights are short, but stargazing is still possible. This week, we have two activities, one for the amateur astronomers of each … Read more

New Models Let Us Dive Into One of The Brightest Star Explosions We’ve Ever Seen

A star that exploded into brightness nearly 200 years ago can now be explored in glorious, multi-wavelength detail. In a new video, a team of scientists modeled the Homunculus Nebula around the star Eta Carinae in three dimensions, enabling insight into this incredible event.   The binary system Eta Carinae started erupting in the late … Read more

Astronomers Have Identified a New Kind of Supernova We Never Knew Existed

We often think of supernova explosions as inevitable for large stars. Big star runs out of fuel, gravity collapses its core, and BOOM! But astronomers have long thought at least one type of large star didn’t end with a supernova. Known as Wolf-Rayet stars, they were thought to end with a quiet collapse of their core … Read more

The Flame Nebula Blazes Like a Cosmic Bonfire in This Stunning New Image

A new image of the Flame Nebula shows the interstellar cloud as we’ve never seen it before. A team of astronomers using the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope has captured the star-forming region in radio wavelengths, revealing details that we had never seen before.   The Flame Nebula, which is close to the famous Horsehead … Read more

Astronomers Discovery a Brand New Type of Nebula, And It’s Very Cool

Most Universe Today readers are familiar with nebulae. They’re gaseous structures lit up with radiation from nearby stars, and they’re some of nature’s most beautiful forms. With the help of amateur astronomers who laid the groundwork, an international team of astronomers has discovered a new type of nebulae around binary stars that they’re calling galactic … Read more

‘Orion’s Fireplace’: Flame Nebula is ablaze with color in stunning new image

The Flame Nebula rings in the New Year from the constellation Orion in a blazing new photo from the European Southern Observatory (ESO).  In the new telescope view, the nebula, nicknamed “Orion’s fireplace,” looks like an inferno, but it’s actually a colorful cloud of interstellar dust and gas and a nursery for new star formation. … Read more

Hubble takes amazing photos of the Prawn Nebula and a newborn star

By Gege Li Photograph Hubble Space Telescope These two spectacular images are some of the most recent shots of our solar system snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope. Its goals include investigating celestial bodies, such as planets and stars, and probing how our universe is evolving. Nasa, Esa, And J. Tan (Chalmers University Of Technology) … Read more

Astronomers Spot a Ghostly ‘One-Winged Butterfly’ Blazing Through Space

The beautiful birth of a star has produced an exquisitely ethereal structure in interstellar space. It’s called the Chamaeleon Infrared Nebula, located about 520 light-years away, and in a new image from the NSF NOIRLab’s International Gemini Observatory in Chile, it appears in the sky like a pale gossamer butterfly wing.   At its core, … Read more