Astronomers measure a star’s brightness using the apparent magnitude system, where lower values indicate brighter stars.

Her mentor Harlow Shapley initially urged Payne to continue the work of a computer, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who had realized that variations in some stars’ light could be used to measure distances.

Different stages of star formation can be measured in different ways, a number of which involve so-called emission lines – narrow regions within the electromagnetic spectrum where an object emits much ...

At extremely high densities, quarks are expected to form pairs, a phenomenon called color superconductivity. The strength of pairing inside a color superconductor is related to the pressure of dense ...