Object 159: That One Very Famous Double Star

The spiral galaxy NGC 3718 has an unusually weird spiral shape, which belies its unusual history.

While amateur astronomers know that Albireo is a very spectacular-looking double star, professional astronomers are more interested in the dynamical complexities of Albireo's two star systems.

The gamma ray burst GRB 020819 took place in a galaxy containing so much light-obscuring interstellar dust that people initially misidentified which galaxy contained the burst.

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.