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Lima and Vanzella joined with George Matsas of São Paulo State University in their latest work to examine a model of the highly-curved spacetime that appears during formation of an ultradense neutron star. For some reasonable values of the mass and size of the star, they predict that the vacuum energy will grow within milliseconds for some values of the coupling parameter. At this point the vacuum energy would begin to induce additional gravitational effects, which they haven't yet calculated, so they don't know how the star would be affected. If further research shows such a neutron star to be unstable, the existence of stable neutron stars of particular sizes could rule out the existence fields of the type they modeled.

Astronomers have discovered a whole new class of alien planet: a vast population of Jupiter-mass worlds that float through space without any discernible host star, a new study finds.

Sumi and his team looked at two years' worth of data from a telescope in New Zealand, which was monitoring 50 million Milky Way stars for microlensing events. They identified 474 such events, including 10 that lasted less than two days. The short duration of these 10 events indicated that the foreground object in each case was not a star but a planet roughly the mass of Jupiter. And the signals from their parent stars were nowhere to be found.

Astronomers studying sound waves on a distant star have discovered that it has a magnetic cycle similar to our sun's solar cycle.

an old giant star wallows in a "steam bath"

These spectrometers were able to confirm that CW Leonis' water was present very close in to the star, all the way down to near its surface - far too close to have come from comets.