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Astronomers have discovered a cluster of orphan stars which are forming in a tail of gas far from its parent galaxy. The discovery of these stars suggests that ‘orphan’ stars may be more common than first thought. The tail extends more than 210,000 light years and was created as gas was stripped from a galaxy called ESO 137-001. The gas in the tail has formed millions of stars. Because of the large amount of gas and dust required to form stars astronomers have previously thought it was unlikely for a large numbers of stars to form outside a galaxy.

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Venus, the third brightest object in the sky after the Sun and Moon, now gleams in the east before dawn.

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Scientists have used the Hubble Space Telescope to capture these images of four nebulae – stars that have started to cast off their outer layers at the end of their 10 billion year lives. Our day our sun will also do the same thing but it won’t be in our lifetime, or anyone elses lifetime any time soon. These four nebula are about 7-8000 light-years away in the Milky Way. Two of the pictures of are included below…

This is ‘He 2-47′ which is also called the starfish. He 2-47 can be found in the southern constellation.

NGC 5315 is a nebula located in the constellation Circinus.

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Astronomers have discovered several Earth-sized oceans of water that have fallen into a planet-forming region around an embryonic star. Dan Watson at the University of Rochester believes they are the first to find and see a brief stage of disk formation – the way in which a planetary system’s supply of water arrives. The discovery is the first-ever glimpse of material directly feeding a protoplanetary disk.

The star in question (IRAS 4B) lies in a picturesque nebula (NGC 1333) about 1000 light years away. It is one of a list of 30 of young protostars known. IRAS 4B is the only one of the thirty stars to show any sign of such material, as seen by the infrared spectrum of water vapor. The characteristics of IRAS4B’s infrared spectrum can be explained by material falling from the protostar onto a surrounding disk. This disk-accretion shock is the mechanism of the disks from which all planetary systems are thought to originate.

Among the details known so far for the rate of rainfall onto the disk, which is about 23 Earth masses per year. The area of the puddle is greater than the size of the orbit of Pluto.These results will help astronomers assess the planet-forming potential of IRAS4B’s disk. This in turn will help us learn about the earliest stages of our own solar system.

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