The "new stars" are best seen from the Southern Hemisphere, but people have spotted them from the United States by looking ...

The explosion of a star, called a supernova, is an immensely violent event. It usually involves a star more than eight times ...

A red giant star and white dwarf orbit each other in an NASA animation of a nova. The white dwarf explodes after years of stripping the red giant's atmosphere.

Understanding how these worlds will evolve during the red giant and white dwarf phases is important. It also sheds light on the evolution of our own solar system. What happens when a star dies.

Even if Earth does survive, it won’t be pretty. The temperature of our planet will be about 1,300 degrees C, hot enough to ...

The team has determined that the star is a white dwarf, a system resembling what our sun-Earth system will look like in 8 billion years. The good news: the planet survived its star's red giant ...

White dwarfs typically have a radius just .01 times that of our own sun, but their mass is about the same. ... At this stage, the star becomes a large red giant.

The precursors of heavy elements might arise in the plasma underbellies of swollen stars or in smoldering stellar corpses.

In six billion years the sun will expand into a red giant. That process should consume Mercury, and maybe Venus. For a long time we have thought it might incinerate Earth, too.. But perhaps all is ...

By the end of the red giant phase, the sun is expected to have withered to a white dwarf no bigger than Earth with about half its mass intact. By that point, Earth would be in an orbit twice its ...

It causes the red giant to "expel the outer layers onto the white dwarf." Once this happens, it creates a massive explosion that's roughly equivalent to a nuclear bomb going off.

Understanding how these worlds will evolve during the red giant and white dwarf phases is important. It also sheds light on the evolution of our own solar system. What happens when a star dies.