Object IRAS 23077+6707 The sky is littered with small fuzzy blobs that are chock full of science waiting to be understood. And one such fuzzy blob looks surreally like a butterfly.  Discovered in 2016, this object, cataloged as IRAS 23077+6707, is located about...

Infrared image of the shockwave (red arc) created by the massive giant star Zeta Ophiuchi in an interstellar dust cloud. The tenuous winds of sun-like main-sequence stars are much more difficult to observe. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech; NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team...

This image, taken with the VLT Survey Telescope hosted at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, shows the beautiful nebula NGC 6164/6165, also known as the Dragon’s Egg. The nebula is a cloud of gas and dust surrounding a pair of stars called HD 148937. Credit: ESO/VPHAS+ team....

Courtesy TeePublic It is possible to buy stickers, sweatshirts, mugs, and all manner of other stuff and things emblazoned with the simple phrase, “We are star stuff”. Carl Sagan popularized this phrase, and it serves as a gentle reminder that all the complex atoms -...

An artist’s impression of a Type Ia supernova – the explosion of a white dwarf locked in a binary system with a companion star. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab/C. Carreau As a scientist, I get a lot of weird hate mail. There are the folks telling me relativity is wrong....

Artist’s impression of the different layers inside a massive neutron star, with the red circle representing a sizable quark-matter core. Credit: Jyrki Hokkanen, CSC Ok, hold onto your brains; things are about to get dense around here. Our universe’s most massive stars...

Visualization of a binary star experiencing mass transfer. Credit: Ylva Götberg One factor upping the difficulty of understanding our universe is… the complexity of our universe. It sometimes feels like every time we think we’re getting a handle on how things work,...