When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. If you sampled the hundreds of billions of stars in any galaxy and plotted their luminosity ...

Imagine you are being given an important assignment by a taskmaster with a strange sense of humor. Your job is to study a forest, but you can only work according to a rather bizarre set of rules. For ...

Planets accompany most sun-like stars. The orbits of many are sufficiently close that they will be engulfed when their host stars ascend the giant branch. This Letter compares the power generated by ...

Russell drew a simple system of coordinates with x- and y-axes, familiar to schoolchildren from geometry lessons. On this diagram, he entered the stars according to their spectral type or temperature ...

Discover the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, a key tool graphing the brightness of stars against color in astronomy. That's really funny, and I wish I had thought of it. The vertical axis is fame, as ...