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 ...

A simple diagram, which celebrates its centennial this year, continues to serve as the most essential conceptual tool in stellar astrophysics Modern astronomy paints a vivid picture of the universe ...

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 ...

Graphing variables is a critical skill in science. If something depends on something else -- like the speed of sounds depends on air density, or the surface gravity of an object depends on its size -- ...

A thin gap has been discovered on the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram (HRD), the most fundamental of all maps in stellar astronomy, a finding that provides new information about the interior structures of ...

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 ...

This example uses computer-generated data to mimic a Hertzsprung-Russell plot (Struve and Zebergs 1962, p. 259) of the temperature and luminosity of stars. The data are plotted and displayed in Output ...

The following data are reported in Rousseeuw and Leroy (1987, p. 27) and are based on Humphrey (1978) and Vansina and De Greve (1982). The 47 observations correspond to the 47 stars of the CYG OB1 ...