A Dying Star One Thousand Times Bigger Than The Sun Could Soon Explode

One of the brightest stars in the sky has been noticeably getting dimmer. Betelgeuse, a reddish star that is part of the Orion constellation, may be entering a pre-supernova phase - where it gets fainter before collapsing in a fiery explosion. A supernova is a powerful stellar explosion that occurs when a star 'dies'.

According to a report in Slate, over the last few months, Betelgeuse has gone from being the 12th brightest star in the sky to about the 20th. Located 642.5 light-years from Earth, this star, if it explodes, could be the closest supernova observed by humans.

NASA TESS Discovers Super Earth That Could Have Life, And it is 31 Light Years Away

Scientists have characterised the first potentially habitable world outside our own solar system located about 31 light-years away. The super-Earth planet — named GJ 357 d — was discovered in early 2019 owing to NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a mission designed to comb the heavens for exoplanets, according to the research published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. GJ 357 d, a super-Earth, could provide Earth-like conditions and orbits the dwarf star every 55.7 days at a distance about one-fifth of Earth's distance from the sun

Astronomers Find The 'Impossible': A Galaxy Without Dark Matter

Stupefied astronomers on Wednesday unveiled the first and only known galaxy without dark matter, the invisible and poorly-understood substance thought to make up a quarter of the Universe. The discovery could revise or even upend theories of how galaxies are formed, they reported in the journal Nature. "This is really bizarre," said co-author Roberto Abraham, an astronomer at the University of Toronto. "For a galaxy this size, it should have 30 times as much dark matter as regular matter," he told AFP by phone. "What we found is that there is no dark matter at all." "That shouldn't be possible," he added. There are 200 billion observable galaxies, perhaps more, astronomers estimate.

The Strangest Star In The Sky Finally Has An Explanation For Its Flicker

Fourteen hundred light-years separate Earth from the strangest star in the sky. The light from this star flickers, like a giant neon sign drifting through the constellation Cygnus. After the star's dim intervals, which last for days or weeks, it brightens again. No other star acted this way. No observation could explain its behavior. That is, until now. A 200-strong team of scientists says it has arrived at an answer, thanks to an astronomy project crowdfunded on Kickstarter. The culprits are not aliens, as some people have speculated, but probably a cloud of dust, each particle less than a micrometer across. Combined, these dust particles coalesced into one of the biggest question marks in recent astronomical memory.

60-Million-Year-Old Meteorite Strike Discovered In Scotland

Simon Drake, an associate lecturer in geology at Birkbeck University of London, zeroed in on a meter-thick layer at the base of a 60.0 million-year-old lava flow.