Death and Birth of Stars

Combining the best features of the National Science Foundation’s new Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia with those of the NSF’s Very Large Array in New Mexico, astronomers have produced a vastly improved radio image of the Orion Nebula and developed a valuable new technique for studying star formation and other astrophysical processes.

Star formation is a longer process than previously thought, and is heavily dependent on outside events, such as supernova explosions, to trigger it, a team of astronomers has concluded. The scientists reached their conclusions after making a detailed study of a number of the dark gas clouds in which new stars are formed.

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s newly commissioned Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have discovered a windfall of three previously undetected millisecond pulsars in a dense cluster of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.

A team of astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array radio telescope has caught an old star during the very brief period of its transformation into a planetary nebula, a shining bubble of glowing gas with a hot remnant star at its center.

Astronomers have used the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array radio telescope to do a very detailed map of the magnetic field within a star-forming cloud.