A star like the Sun spends roughly 10 billion years fusing the hydrogen in its core into helium, releasing energy in the process. But eventually, it exhausts its fuel supply. And when fusion stops ...

NASA, Donald Walter/South Carolina State University/Paul Scowen/ Brian Moore/Arizona State University A glimpse up at the night sky will reveal a seemingly endless landscape of twinkling stars, but ...

As we continue to break new ground in the field of cosmology, the importance of carefully categorizing the objects we see comes into focus. Part of this stems from the fact that, increasingly, we find ...

When a star runs out of fuel, it sheds its outer layers of gas and, if it doesn't explode in a supernova, forms a glowing shell of ionized gas that expands into space. Shells like these are known as ...

If you caught my previous column, you may have tried your hand at using the white-on-black sketching technique for deep-sky objects. Now it’s time to step it up a notch. The challenge isn’t always in ...

Compass needles? Astronomers have discovered something weird in the Milky Way's galactic bulge - a population of planetary nebula are all mysteriously pointing in the same direction. They noticed the ...

The final stages of life for a star like our Sun result in the star blowing its outer layers out into the surrounding space, forming objects known as planetary nebulae in a wide range of beautiful and ...

New images from the Hubble Space Telescope show two beautiful planetary nebulae, known as the Butterfly Nebula and the Jewel Bug Nebula. These two objects are of interest to scientists not only ...

The birth of the most massive stars -- those ten to a hundred times the mass of the Sun -- has posed an astrophysical riddle for decades. Massive stars are dense enough to fuse hydrogen while they're ...

Bipolar, binary planetary nebula have aligned themselves with the galactic "bulge" while glowing with ionized gas, putting on quite a show. Matt is a staff writer for DiscoverMagazine.com, where he ...

As we continue to break new ground in the field of cosmology, the importance of carefully categorizing the objects we see comes into focus. Part of this stems from the fact that, increasingly, we find ...