Fashions News

Hubble spies dazzling death of a sunlike star. On Feb. 13 NASA released this shot of a dying star—a white dwarf shown as a bright dot near the center of nebula NGC 2440—that was once similar to our sun.

Bizarre object found circling star. An object detected orbiting a neutron star is among the strangest planet-mass bodies ever found, astronomers said in September. Instead of circling around a normal star, the low-mass object—likely the "skeleton" of a smaller star—orbits a rapidly spinning pulsar, or neutron star. The odd mass, which was spotted on June 7 by NASA's Swift and Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellites, orbits the bigger star in a little less than once an hour.

New Mars pictures show signs of watery "aquifers." Stunning images from a satellite orbiting Mars reveal that water once snuck along fractures in Mars's layered rocks, according to a study that appeared in the Feb. 17 issue of the journal Science.

Helix nebula. Dust from comets that survived the death of their star is clouding the "eye" of the distant Helix nebula, as revealed by an image released by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope on Feb. 12.

Magnetar explosion. A rare celestial body known as a magnetar shimmers in an explosion of x-rays in an artist's depiction. The unusual object, about 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius, is a small, fast-spinning neutron star that periodically shoots out huge cataclysms of x-ray emissions.

Alien life may be "weirder" than scientists think, report says. An artist's rendering depicts the NASA/ESA Huygens probe floating in a lake of methane on Saturn's moon Titan. A report issued on July 6 by the National Academy of Sciences said that extraterrestrial organisms might be even more bizarre than experts had previously predicted. The report concluded that scientists need to consider an expanded list of characteristics that define life, including so-called "weird" life-forms that may thrive where Earth organisms couldn't.

Supernova destroys "Pillars of Creation." In a thousand years, astronomers predicted in January, people on Earth will see the iconic "Pillars of Creation" get toppled by a supernova, the explosive death of a giant star. The pillars are dense clouds of gas in the Eagle Nebula, a star nursery in the constellation Serpens, near Sagittarius. They were made famous by a dramatic 1995 Hubble Space Telescope image (inset).

Solar system is "bullet shaped." A graphic depicts the solar system, encased in an envelope of charged particles (yellow), as it passes through the interstellar magnetic field of the Milky Way galaxy (brown lines). A study that appeared in the May 11 issue of the journal Science used data from the far-flung Voyager spacecraft to determine that the solar system takes on a bulletlike shape as it passes through space.

Jupiter Auroras "northern lights on steroids." Those dashing purple puffs are x-ray images of the gas giant's high-voltage auroras—"northern lights on steroids," said planetary scientist Randy Gladstone of an image released by NASA in March.

Superbright comet sweeps across southern skies. Australian astronomer Robert McNaught first discovered the comet last August via a telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales, Australia. The celestial body's orbit brought it close to the sun in early January, making the comet visible to the naked eye in the Northern Hemisphere.