Artwork of an imaginary planetary nebula. This is a glowing shell of gas cast off by a star near the end of its life. The star can be seen at the centre of the nebula. The Sun will one day form a planetary nebula, once its internal stock of hydrogen ...

This once normal star, having exhausted its internal supply of hydrogen, has expanded, growing into a gargantuan caricature of its former self called a red giant. It is dozens or hundreds of times its original size. Any nearby planets will be engulfe...

A surface mass ejection (SME), depicted in this illustration, is a relatively recently discovered phenomenon in stellar astrophysics. They are similar to coronal mass ejections but on a far larger scale. During an SME, a star can release hundreds of ...

Astronomers at NOIRLab (Tucson, Arizona, USA) have detected what they believe is the first sighting of the destruction of a gas giant planet caused by the expansion of its ageing red giant star. All sun-like stars expand as their nuclear fuel runs ou...