Object 156: Dust Puffs

The nearby Sun-like star HD 69830 may have three exoplanets orbiting it, but astronomers seem more focused on trying to understand a hard-to-explain dust disk in the star system.

Z Ursa Minor belongs to a class of variable stars that occasionally produce puffs of dust, but this is not the weeirdest thing about them.

The nearby face-on spiral galaxy Messier 101 is one of the most popular galaxies in the sky for astronomers to study, particularly in terms of studying the relative abundances of various elements within the galaxy.

A 0535+26 is a rather unusual star system called a Be high mass X-ray binary that periodically produces bursts of X-ray emission.

Hen 2-113 is a rather unusual planetary nebula that formed not when a Sun-like star died but when a large, massive, and extraordinarily hot Wolf-Rayet star blew away its outer hydrogen layers.

The quasar PKS 2126-158 has been popular to observe because astronomers can see many different things between the quasar and Earth, including an entire cluster of galaxies, that are absorbing light from the quasar.

Beta Ceti is a relatively close giant star where helium fusion has been triggered in its core, but it's a bit unusual compared to other stars that have reached this stage in their evolution.

Wolf 1069 is another nearby red dwarf with an exoplanet, but this time, the exoplanet is more likely to harbor life than other nearby red dwarfs with exoplanets that I may have discussed in previous episodes.

The globular cluster Messier 54 is not part of our galaxy but actually the nuclear stellar core of a dwarf galaxy that has nealy been completely gravitationally torn apart by the Milky Way.

Algol-type variable affected by light travel time effect caused by two smaller red dwarfs on wide orbits; this makes the variability period of the central two stars appear to vary.