Tech Support for Finding Stars

Here's an article by Benji Jones for Gizmodo in which I was interviewed about helping people find stars they have "bought".

People Can't Find the Stars They Paid to Name—and They're Calling Astronomers for Tech Support

The main points:

•  There is nothing official about buying a star - you're just buying a nice certificate.
• Many of the stars cannot be seen without substantial amateur size telescopes
• You can see them online fairly easilly. 

I had previously (like over a decade ago!) written about this for the Curious about Astronomy? Ask an Astronomer website.: "How can I find the star that I bought?"

ALMA image of a star

On the front cover of a recent ESO newsletter in our coffee room is this image.

ALMA Observations of R Sculptoris. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

This is an ALMA observation of a nearby red giant (or asymptotic giant branch) star R Sculptoris. The structure you can see is gas clouds around the star -  the result of its outer atmosphere expanding and blowing off during a "thermal pulse" in this advanced stage of the star's life cycle. 

This is really useful for astronomers to constrain how much mass stars loose during these stages (which helps us to weigh galaxies from measuring the amount of starlight they give off). 

What's neat is that this is what our Sun will probably start doing one day (in about 4-5 billion years from now or so). And to put it in scale, the material "puffed" off to make that structure, was more than a thousand times the mass of the Earth..... 

For some reason I missed this when it was first released, but no worries - Phil Plait wrote an awesome article about it where you can learn a lot more.

Why do People Draw Stars with Five Points (in English and Romanian)

A beautiful 5 pointed star made from fractals. 

Another question I answered during my time with Curious? Ask an Astronomer at Cornell: Why do People Draw Stars with Five Points? has recently been translated into Romanian.  (Also see Wikipedia entry on 5 pointed stars, which I don't think existed when I wrote the post).