One of the Coolest Discoveries About Andromeda You Never Knew About     You’ve may have heard of this famous galaxy called Andromeda or M31. It’s located 2.5 million light years away and it’s so large that it can even be seen with the naked eye! However, that’s not the astounding fact I want to talk about today. What’s really interesting is this research paper published in the new Nature issue (March 2014). What researchers discovered is that Andromeda is surrounded by numerous small satellite galaxies (that’s not even the new part!). Astronomers from the Niels Bhor Institute, and among others, detected a string of stars in one of Andromeda’s outer galaxies called Andromeda II. As these researchers follow the movement of the stars they uncovered that they were left over from a merger between two dwarf galaxies. Mergers of such low...

What is a Pulsar and Why are they Incredibly Deadly?     Pulsars are one of the most energetic and deadly death rays that exist in the universe, and you know what makes them even worse? When they are pointed at Earth.  First things first is laying down the definition of a pulsar. A pulsar is basically the endpoint of a stellar evolution. Think of a star, at least 8 times bigger and no more than 50 times bigger than our Sun, that spends its happy life fusing atoms and burning up oxygen, helium, hydrogen and so on. Then near the end of its life it gets to a point where it exceeds the Chandrasekhar limit and the star collapses upon itself and exerting most of its energy and mass outward until it is halted by a neutron degeneracy and all that’s left is a dense neutron star. These neutron stars are only about 13 km in radius and spins 642 times per second! But then something...

The Gorgeous Butterfly Nebula NGC 6302 Emerges from a Dying Star     What a beautiful image of the Butterfly Nebula. This planetary nebula is a result of a dying star that was 5 times the mass of our own Sun and released a fury of hot gasses and a stream of ultraviolet radiation. For those of you who don’t know it’s called a planetary nebula because when viewed through a telescope it appears to look like a planet. In the 1780’s William Herschel coined the term planetary nebula even though it is a misnomer, astronomers still use the term today. The gas you see in the image is ripping through space at 965,606 km an hour (600,000 miles an hour), fast enough to travel from the Earth to the Moon in 24 minutes! If you wanted to take a trip to the Butterfly Nebula or also known as the Bug Nebula it would take you about 2,200 years travelling at the speed of light....