Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered many “infant” or new stars forming in the area of the head of Orion (the Hunter) located about 1,200 light-years away.

A team of astronomers using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mount Kea, Hawaii has measured the magnetic field of the star Tau Bootis in the constellation Bootes (the Herdsman.) (It looks like an ice cream cone and can be seen in the summer.) Astronomers say the star has about 1.5 solar masses and is about 50 light years from Earth.

A pulsar is formed when a very large star reaches the end of its life cycle. The large star becomes unstable as it uses up its fuel. It explodes as a supernova. The outer materials are blasted into space. The center collapses into a fast-spinning, radio-wave-emitting pulsar. The original solar system of planets, moons, and other bodies orbiting the star is destroyed as a result of the huge explosion.

There are many remarkable things about Polaris, the North Star. It lies less than one degree from the North Celestial Pole, and has been used for navigation for thousands of years. Polaris A is a very young star. It’s only about 100 million years old, about the same age as the Pleiades star cluster in Taurus (the Bull).

Hubble Space Telescope spectrographic images of Sirius A and B have been studied by a team of astronomers lead by Martin Barstow from the University of Leicester, England. They have discovered new information on the brightest-looking star in our nighttime sky Sirius A and it’s companion star Sirius B.

Since the 1700’s, astronomers have believed that more than half of the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy were binary (two stars in orbit of each other) or multiple star systems (more than two stars in orbit of each other). Now astronomers believe that most stars in our galaxy tend to be alone or single star systems.

In 1572, a star named Tycho exploded into a supernova. The remnant cloud can be seen by astronomers. A team of astronomers led by Pilar Ruiz-Lapuente from the University of Barcelona, Spain has found a star moving through the wreckage.

Stars are named in several different ways. The brightest stars have proper names that were given thousands of years ago. Sirius and Procyon were named by the ancient Greeks; Betelguese and Aldebaran were named by the Arabics.