Top 10 Star Mysteries

#1 Stellar Rumbles

A starquake is thought to be the tearing apart of the surface of a neutron star, much like an earthquake here on Earth. In 1999 astronomers identified these bursts as the cause of gamma rays and X-rays coming from neutron stars. Predicting these powerful bursts has remained a mystery. Recently, John Middleditch of Los Alamos National Laboratory and his team found that for a particular type of spinning neutron star called a pulsar, the time to the next quake is proportional to the size of the last quake.

Stellar Rumbles  (source: link)

Beautiful images of the Milky Way

Milky Way

The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our Solar System. Its name “milky” is derived from its appearance as a dim glowing band arching across the night sky in which the naked eye cannot distinguish individual stars. The term “Milky Way” is a translation of the Latin via lactea, from the Greek γαλαξίας κύκλος (galaxías kýklos, "milky circle"). From the Earth, the Milky Way appears like a band because its disk-shaped structure is viewed from within the Galaxy. Galileo Galilei first resolved the band of light into individual stars with his telescope in 1610. In the past, astronomers thought that all of the stars in the universe were contained inside of the Milky Way. Following the 1920 Great Debate between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, observations by Edwin Hubble definitively showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies.

Black Hole Photos

Black Hole

A black hole is a region of spacetime from which gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will usually deform spacetime to form a black hole. Around a black hole, there is a mathematically defined surface called an event horizon that marks the point of no return. The hole is called "black" because it absorbs all the light that hits the horizon, reflecting nothing, just like a perfect black body in thermodynamics. Quantum field theory in curved spacetime predicts that event horizons emit radiation like a black body with a finite temperature. This temperature is inversely proportional to the mass of the black hole, making it difficult to observe this radiation for black holes of stellar mass or greater.