Zooming in on the First Stars
10.06.2003

What became of the first stars? No known stars appear to be composed of truly primordial gas -- all of the stars around us have too many heavy elements. Our own Sun is thought to be a third generation star, with many second-generation stars seen in globular clusters.

GL 105C: The Coolest Star?
20.09.1995

Is the dim star to the upper right of this false-color picture the coolest possible normal star? From this recent picture by the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have estimated its mass is just high enough for it to fuse hydrogen into helium in its core.

Diffraction Spikes: When Stars Look Like Crosses
19.11.1997

Unusual appendages around bright stars are commonplace, but never seem to be mentioned. What are they? First, a telescope brings starlight falling over a large area to a small area. To get at this...

Symbiotic Star Bubbles
31.08.1999

The two stars at the center of this nebula are very different. One is a white dwarf star with a mass similar to our Sun but with a radius as small as our Earth.

Hot Stars in the Southern Milky Way
7.05.1999

Hot blue stars, red glowing hydrogen gas, and dark, obscuring dust clouds are strewn through this dramatic region of the Milky Way in the southern constellation of Ara (the Altar). About 4,000 light-years from Earth, the stars at the left are young, massive, and energetic.

Sagittarius Star Cloud
13.01.1999

Stars come in all different colors. The color of a star indicates its surface temperature, an important property used to assign each star a spectral type. Most stars in the above Sagittarius Star Cloud are orange or red and relatively faint, as our Sun would appear.

Stars of NGC 206
2.04.1999

Nestled within the dusty arms of the large spiral galaxy Andromeda (M31), the star cluster NGC 206 is one of the largest star forming regions known in our local group of galaxies. The beautiful...

N81: Star Cradle in the SMC
5.10.2000

This dramatic Hubble Space Telescope image captures the birth of a cluster of massive stars. The newborn stars are seen just as they emerge from their natal nebula. Only 12 light-years across, the nebula...

Polaris: The North Star
6.10.1999

Polaris is quite an unusual star. First, Polaris is the nearest bright star to the north spin axis of the Earth. Therefore, as the Earth turns, stars appear to rotate around Polaris, making it the North Star.

Orion Star Colours
29.08.1998

What determines a star's colour? Its temperature. Red stars are cool, around 3,000 kelvins (K), while blue stars are hotter and can have temperatures over 30,000 K. Our own lovely yellow Sun's temperature is a comforting 6,000 K.