Tag Archives: star

Astronomers have captured the first views of a young sun-like star blowing bubbles, offering a rare glimpse at how our solar neighborhood might have behaved in its youth. Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatoryresearchers observed HD 61005 — a young star located about 120 light-years from Earth with roughly the same mass and temperature as our sun — and detected a vast bubble of hot gas surrounding it. This wind-blown bubble, known as an "astrosphere," forms when a star's powerful stellar wind slams into surrounding interstellar gas and dust, carving out a protective cavity much like the sun's heliosphere that shields our solar system from galactic cosmic rays, according to a statement from NASA. This marks the first X-ray evidence of an astrosphere around a star like our sungiving astronomers their clearest look yet at one of these...