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The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is the Milky Way’s most massive satellite galaxy. Because it’s so easily observed, astronomers have studied it intently. They’re interested in how star formation in the LMC might have been different than in the Milky Way. A team of researchers zeroed in on the LMC’s most metal-deficient stars to find out how different. The LMC is about 163,000 light-years away and about 32,000 light-years across. Even though it’s that large, [...]

Quaoar is one of about 3,000 dwarf planets in our Solar System’s Kuiper Belt. Astronomers discovered it in 2002. It’s only half as large as Pluto, about 1,121 km (697 mi) in diameter. Quaoar has a tiny moon named Weywot, and the planet and its moon are very difficult to observe in detail. Astronomers took advantage of an occultation to study the dwarf planet Quaoar and found that it has something unexpected: a ring where a moon should be. Occultations are observational gold to [...]

Eclipsing binary star systems are relatively common in our Universe. To the casual observer, these systems look like a single star, but are actually composed of two stars orbiting closely together. The study of these systems offers astronomers an opportunity to directly measure the fundamental properties (i.e. the masses and radii) of these systems respective stellar components. Recently, a team of Brazilian astronomers observed a rare sight in the Milky Way – an eclipsing binary composed [...]