A research team used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton to study the amount of nitrogen and carbon near a black hole that was known to have torn a star apart. Astronomers believe the nitrogen and carbon were created inside the star as it neared the black hole before it was ripped apart.

“We are seeing the guts of what used to be a star,” said Jon Miller, U-M professor of astronomy who led the study. “The elements left behind are clues we can follow to figure out what sort of star met its demise.”

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Every 50,000 years or so, a nomadic star passes near our solar system. Most brush by without incident. But, every once in a while, one comes so close that it gains a prominent place in Earth’s night sky, as well as knocks distant comets loose from their orbits. 

The most famous of these stellar interlopers is called Scholz’s Star. This small binary star system was discovered in 2013. Its orbital path indicated that, about 70,000 years ago, it passed through the Oort Cloud, the extended sphere of icy bodies that surrounds the fringes of our solar system.

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The Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes have observed the most distant star ever seen – Earendel – whose name means morning star. Even though Earendel is 50 times the mass of our sun, and millions of times brighter, we would not normally be able to see it. We can only see it due to an alignment of the star with a large galaxy cluster in front of it whose gravity bends the light from the star to make it brighter and more focused. The galaxy cluster essentially acts as a lens.

NASA released new images Monday taken by the James Webb Space Telescope of the Ring Nebula – one of the first known examples of cosmic gas and dust formed by a dying star discovered by humans.

The Ring Nebula is an early example of a planetary nebula – when gases and emissions produced by a dying star emit a glowing, colorful shell.

The Solar Orbiter mission has discovered jets of material rapidly releasing from the sun’s outer atmosphere.

Astronomers believe these jets could be the source of the solar wind, a stream of charged particles that continuously flows from the sun across the solar system. The jets of charged particles, called plasma, last between 20 and 100 seconds each and move at about 223,694 miles per hour (360,000 kilometers per hour).

Astronomers have been puzzling over a mystery on Neptune, and now they think they have unlocked its secret.

The ice giant’s ghostly, cirrus-like clouds largely disappeared four years ago. Today, just a patch hovers over the planet’s south pole.

Thanks to an analysis of nearly three decades’ worth of Neptune observations captured by three space telescopes, scientists have determined the ice giant’s diminished clouds may indicate that shifts in their abundance are in sync with the solar cycle, according to a recent study published in the journal Icarus.

A newly discovered star system is breaking records — and helping scientists unravel the mysteries of an extreme type of planet known as hot Jupiters. In a paper published Aug. 14 in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers describe how the system could help further our understanding of worlds beyond our solar system.

The binary system, located 1,400 light-years away, consists of a “white dwarf” and a “brown dwarf.” White dwarfs are the crystalline cores of large stars that ran out of fuel and collapsed under their own gravity.

Black holes have a speed limit. When two black holes collide, the larger black hole created in the merger can be blasted off by the energy of the collision, and now we know the highest speed possible from this recoil process.

One of the great mysteries in astronomy is how galaxies form. At issue is why stars gather into “island universes” rather than spreading out evenly through the universe.

One clue comes from the observation that most galaxies contain massive black holes at their centers. That has led to the proposal that galaxies form around black holes which act as seeds for this process.