Astronomers may have solved the mystery of how some of the brightest and hottest stars in the cosmos are born. The team, led by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), found ...

Blue supergiants are rock-and-roll: they live fast and die young. This makes them rare and difficult to study. Before space telescopes were invented, few blue supergiants had been observed, so our ...

Artistic image of a binary system of a red giant star and a younger companion that can merge to produce a blue supergiant. B-type blue supergiants are very luminous and hot stars (at least 10,000 ...

Some of the brightest and hottest stars in existence may be formed by the collision of two other stars, astronomers have found. The formation of these intensely bright stars, called blue supergiants, ...

Stars are the basic elements of construction of galaxies, and therefore of the observable universe. Among the different types of stars there are some whose mass is more than 8 times the mass of the ...

BERKELEY – Twenty years ago next month, the closest and brightest supernova in four centuries lit up the southern sky, wowing astronomers and the public alike. A Luminous Blue Variable star named ...

Three mysterious debris rings surrounding Supernova 1987A were formed during an ancient two-star merger that eventually led to an enormous stellar explosion, a new computer model suggests. The model, ...

Astronomers have captured the first close-up image of a star beyond our galaxy, taken during a dramatic moment near the end of the star’s life. In it, the “behemoth” star appears to puff out gas and ...

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) XMM-Newton space observatory has watched a faint star flare up at X-ray wavelengths to almost 10,000 times its normal brightness. Astronomers believe the outburst was ...