What Is A Neutron Star?

Neutron stars are created when giant stars die in supernovae and their cores collapse, with the protons and electrons essentially melting into each other to form neutrons. Neutron stars are city-size stellar objects with a mass about 1.4 times that of the sun. Born from the explosive death of another, larger stars, these tiny objects … Read more

Accretion Of A Giant Planet Onto A White Dwarf Star

The Neptune-sized planet, which orbits an Earth-sized star, is being slowly evaporated by the white dwarf, causing the planet to lose some 260 million tons of material every day. For the first time, astronomers have discovered evidence for a giant planet orbiting a tiny, dead white dwarf star. And, surprisingly, the Neptune-sized planet is more … Read more

What If We had Two Suns in The Solar System?

For a long time, this was a purely theoretical question. Over the past decade or so, however, astronomers have found more than a dozen confirmed instances of “circumbinary planets”—that is, planets that orbit around a close double star. A particularly interesting case is the planet Kepler-1647b, which circles two roughly sunlike stars. This planet also … Read more

Black Holes Are Strange Sure But White Holes Are Mind-Blowing

White holes are black ones in reverse, spewing out matter– and they could give us our first glimpse of the quantum source of space-time. In the textbooks, Gravitation and Cosmology, Nobel prizewinning physicist Steven Weinberg wrote that the existence of black holes “very hypothetical”, there is no [black hole] in the gravitational field of any … Read more