ICYMI: National park rangers in #Utah are preserving something incredible: truly dark skies that reveal the cosmos in all its glory. What makes this special: Dark sky initiatives support #wildlife, human #health, and our connection to the universe.

Learn more: https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/moab-dark-skies-vs-light-pollution

#EinsteinProbe finds twin cannibal #stars that have spent 40 million years taking turns eating each other
Larger of two stars started to expand, as stars do late in life, and became white dwarf with same mass as sun. Second sun – which started life as smaller one - pulled in gas from its dying companion , eventually growing to become Be star that massed about 12 times more than Sol.
By this time, white dwarf's gravity meant it was able to absorb matter from Be star.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/19/einstein_probe_twin_stars_revealed/

What happens when a newly formed #star captures material from a nearby cloud?

Gas, dust, and rocky materials swirl around recently formed #stars, creating a circumstellar disk that seeds the formation of #planets.

Recent observations of some of these disks reveal filamentary structures of material falling into the disk, feeding the planet-forming environment with new ingredients in a process known as “late-stage infall.”

#astronomy
https://aasnova.org/2025/03/21/a-late-stage-infall-renovation-mapping-the-circumstellar-disk-of-ab-aurigae/

100 years ago, Cecilia Payne discovered what the stars are made of It might seem obvious today, but it was just 100 years ago that we discovered that the Sun, and all stars, are made of hydrogen and helium. We should thank Cecilia Payne for that. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #science #stars

100 years ago, Cecilia Payne d...

New JWST image just dropped.

This object is called Herbig-Haro 49/50. It's the outflow of a still-forming star hidden from view to the lower right of the orangish cone of material oriented diagonally in this image.

As stars form they eject excess matter in the direction of their poles of rotation. That material encounters the interstellar medium in the vicinity and lights up in response. "Like the wake of a speeding boat, the bow shocks in this image have an arc-like appearance as the fast-moving jet from the young star slams into the surrounding dust and gas."

Purely by coincidence, the outflow lines up with a distant background galaxy, which is the circular pinkish/blue object at upper left.

More info about the image: https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-telescope-unmasks-true-nature-of-the-cosmic-tornado/

The nearest single star to Earth has four small planets.

Science News reports: "This is the second study in six months to find planets around Barnard’s star."

https://flip.it/3Z.LGK

In the next few months, from its perch atop a mountain in Chile, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will begin surveying the #cosmos with the largest camera ever built.

Every three nights, it will produce a map of the entire southern sky filled with #stars, #galaxies, #asteroids and @supernovae — and swarms of bright #satellites ruining some of the view.

Swarms of satellites are harming #astronomy.

Here’s how researchers are fighting back.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00792-y

I took this photo last week in the Rhön.

Early in the year, the Milky Way is still flat above the horizon and is perfect for panoramas. Later in the year, the Milky Way becomes more and more vertical above the horizon.

 
Lots of names for this #celestial #spectacle: the #BloodMoon, the #FullMoon, even March's #WormMoon.

Most importantly, #MoonGazers, it's the #TotalLunarEclipse, and what we call the #Night of the #KrononautMoon, the Night when #TimeTravelers are invited to come visit, or send us a #quantum #signal from the #beyond!

The Krononaut Moon Project (@KronoMoon) is collecting Full Moon #photos from the far reaches of the #Fediverse, all Thursday Night & all Friday Night, 2025 Mar 13-14. We love a #MoonShot that includes #people in it (or Time Travelers!) — what we call a "#Moonsie". The Total Lunar Eclipse occurs around 07:00 UTC Friday.

Watch the Moon & #Stars this week, and please note any #anomalous #phenomena (#UFOs or #UAP). Share your #documentation with @KronoMoonPhotos & @KronoMoon, or contact: Photos@KronoMoon.org
#MoonOverMastodon #KronoMoon

https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/March_2025_lunar_eclipse
https://KronoMoon.org/#countdown-timer

This is the Helping Hand Nebula, so named for the shape of the hand in the dust reaching over the bright star. This is 20 hours of exposure time with 3 minute subs, but (as with all dark nebulas) it would definitely benefit from more exposure time and darker skies.

Details: https://www.astrobin.com/4w329k/
Prints: https://briangweber.com/featured/the-helping-hand-nebula-brian-weber.html

I like this galaxy very much. However, I don't know if I like it because of its "grand design" or because it reminds me of The Time Tunnel. Yes, that ancient TV show in which Tony and Douglas were inevitably lost in time. (Never understood how the guys in charge could retrieve a massive mammut from the past, but not the pair of time travelers together). Anyway, this is M51, The Time Tunnel.

Did you know we're essentially all #STARS? That is to say, we’re actually the children of stars!

How does it feel to have stars for parents?

https://bigthink.com/the-past/how-we-discovered-were-all-made-of-star-stuff/
(You can skip to the last paragraph :)

Small #planets have nearly circular orbits, while giant planets have orbits about four times more elliptical.

The finding points toward two different pathways by which large and small planets form.

The #eccentricity split coincides with several other iconic features in the #exoplanet population, such as the high abundance of small planets over large planets and a tendency for giant planets to form only around #stars enriched in heavy elements.

#astronomy #exoplanets
https://astrobiology.com/2025/03/small-and-large-planets-have-significantly-different-upbringings.html

Today, the Celestial Raven Pocket Pal got a brand new photoshoot as well! The old ones didn’t give it justice

One is left in stock, you can adopt it on my website https://evanskyarts.com/en/products/celestial-raven-pocket-pal ️

Hot new #JWST image just dropped. (Literally hot; the temperature inside this object can reach upward of 25,000 degrees.)

Meet the planetary #nebula NGC 1514, aka the "Crystal Ball Nebula". It's about 1500 light years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Taurus.

Planetary nebulae occur toward the end of the lives of #stars that have about the mass of the Sun. They shed their outer layers into space, leaving behind an Earth-sized star called a white dwarf. Its temperature can be up to about 100,000 degrees, so it emits a lot of ultraviolet and X-ray light. That light energizes the gas ejected during the earlier phase, lighting it up like a neon sign. (NGC 1514's white dwarf is the bright star at the center with the spikes, which are an artifact of the telescope's optics.)

This image is a composite of individual frames made through three colored filters by the Webb telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). The image shows two concentric shells of material whose bright edges appear as circles. It's actually an hourglass-shaped structure seen an angle inclined to our line of sight toward NGC 1514.

A newly published study finds that these rings are different than the reddish material inside them. The light they emit comes from very tiny grains of carbon-rich material given off by the progenitor star very late in its life.

But why the ring shapes? It turns out that the progenitor star was actually two, only one of which endured this phase of high mass loss. Energetic "winds" given off by the stellar pair shaped the carbon grains as they were pushed away from the system.

(Processing of this image was done by Judy Schmidt: https://www.flickr.com/photos/geckzilla/54206737999)