Runaway Star
26.11.1999

Runaway stars are massive stars traveling rapidly through interstellar space. Like a ship plowing through the interstellar medium, runaway star HD 77581 has produced this graceful arcing bow wave or "bow shock" - compressing the gaseous material in its path.

HD 82943: Planet Swallower
18.05.2001

Stars like HD 82943 are main sequence G dwarf stars with temperatures and compositions similar to the Sun. Also like the Sun, HD 82943 is known to have at least two giant planets, but unlike gas giants in our solar system their orbits are not nearly circular and bring them closer to the parent star.

CFHT Star Trails
5.09.2000

High atop a dormant volcano in Hawaii, an eye 3.6-meters wide stares at a faint light on the night sky. Unlike a human eye, which collects light for only a fraction of a second at a time, a telescope such as the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) can collect light for hours.

Star Party Trails
21.05.1999

Stargazing is fun! If you'd like to try it, this weekend may be your chance as many astronomy clubs and organizations will be hosting public celebrations of Astronomy Day on Saturday, May 22nd. In recent years, open house nights at observatories, astronomy club gatherings, and star parties have become increasingly popular.

The Helix Nebula from CFHT
28.08.2000

One day our Sun may look like this. The Helix Nebula is the closest example of a planetary nebula created at the end of the life of a Sun-like star. The outer gasses of the star expelled into space appear from our vantage point as if we are looking down a helix.

APOD: 2002 September 18- A Sagittarius Starscape
18.09.2002

Many vast star fields in the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy are rich in clouds of stars, dust, and gas. First and foremost, visible in the above picture are millions of stars, many of which are similar to our Sun.

PKS285 02: A Young Planetary Nebula
22.06.1999

How do planetary nebulae acquire their exquisite geometrical shapes? To investigate this, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to image several young planetary nebulae. These nebulae are the outer envelopes of stars like our Sun that have recently been cast away to space, leaving behind a core fading to become a white dwarf.

The Boomerang Nebula in Polarized Light
14.09.2005

Why did the Boomerang Nebula form? The symmetric cloud dubbed the Boomerang appears to have been created by a high-speed wind of gas and dust blowing from an aging central star at speeds of nearly 600,000 kilometers per hour.

Water Found Around Nearby Star CW Leonis
16.07.2001

Do worlds outside our Solar System have oceans of water like Earth? An indication that such worlds might exist was bolstered recently by new evidence that nearby star system CW Leonis harbors water. Recent observations with the Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS) found significant detections of light at specific colors emitted by water.

X Rays Indicate Star Ripped Up by Black Hole
23.02.2004

What could rip a star apart? A black hole. Giant black holes in just the right mass range would pull on the front of a closely passing star much more strongly than on the back.