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Runaway stars leave infrared waves in space

Astronomers are finding dozens of massive, so-called ‘runaway stars’ in our galaxy with the help of images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. When these speedy, massive stars plow through space, they can cause material to stack up in front of them, creating dramatic arc-shaped features called bow shocks.

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Andromeda Galaxy scanned with high-energy X-ray vision

NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has captured the best high-energy X-ray view yet of a portion of the Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest large neighbouring spiral galaxy. The space observatory has observed 40 “X-ray binaries” — intense sources of X-rays comprising a black hole or neutron star that feeds off a stellar companion.

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Ageing stars don’t spin down exactly as expected

New information about the way mature stars spin indicates that one recently developed method for determining a star’s age needs to be recalibrated for stars that are older than our Sun, as spin rate is one of the few windows into stellar ages. This has implications for our own solar system, as our own Sun might be on the cusp of a transition in its magnetic field.

Picture This

A supermassive and super-hungry galaxy

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the spiral galaxy NGC 4845, located over 65 million light-years away in the constellation of Virgo. In 2013 researchers noticed a violent flare from the black hole at the centre of NGC 4845 as it tore up and fed off an object many times more massive than Jupiter that strayed too close and was devoured.

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Strong magnetic fields discovered in majority of stars

A group of astronomers led by the University of Sydney has discovered strong magnetic fields are common in stars, not rare as previously thought, which will dramatically impact our understanding of how stars evolve. The findings could potentially lead to a better understanding of the Sun’s magnetic cycle, which is known to affect communication systems and cloud cover on Earth.