New Type Of Pulsing Star Discovered
Open Star Cluster NGC 3766 ESO Scientists' current understanding of stars says these stars shouldn't vary in brightness, but they do. Astronomers have discovered a new type of pulsing star. There are 36 of the new type, located in a cluster about 7,000 light-years away from Earth. Based on their brightness and temperature, they aren't expected to pulse, but they do. Their brightness varies just 0.1 percent in intensity at regular times, in cycles ranging from two hours to 20 hours. Their discoverers, four astronomers from the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, will now work to learn more about these stars' strange behavior, team member Sophie Saesen said. In general, astronomers classify stars by their temperature and intrinsic brightness. Each star can get an alphanumeric class this way. The Earth's sun, for example, is a G2V. One way to visualize all these stars is to plot them out on a graph, called a...