betelgeuse

Betelgeuse losing mass Explosion will create "new sun" May be set for 2012 appearance IT'S the ultimate experience for Star Wars fans - staring forlornly off into the distance as twin suns sink into the horizon. Yet it's not just a...

After the Big Dipper, probably the best known grouping of stars in the sky is the constellation Orion. Lying on the celestial equator, Orion is an "equal opportunity" constellation, visible from all parts of the world except for the extreme polar regions. [See a star map of Orion and nearby...

As a large star nears the end of its life it begins to shed mass at a tremendous rate. New observations of the supergiant star Betelgeuse may help scientists finally understand how this feat of weight loss is achieved. Views from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in...

In the early 1990's, calculations by the United States Naval Observatory have confirmed the orbital perturbation exhibited by Uranus and Neptune, which Dr. Thomas C Van Flandern, an astronomer at the observatory, says could be explained by "a single undiscovered planet". He and a colleague...

In order to know what the largest star in the universe is we would have had to look at all the stars. We haven't come close to that - we haven't even looked at all the stars in our galaxy. There are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and about as many galaxies in the observable universe so...