At first glance, IC 2497 doesn’t look that odd. It is a spiral galaxy roughly 700 million light-years away (for comparison, the Andromeda galaxy is currently 2.5 million light-years away). There are, however, two interesting things about IC 2497 that aren’t immediately…

Achernar, Regulus and Be stars

If you live in the southern hemisphere, you might be able to see an interesting star called Achernar —…

The Magnificent Seven are, in the field of astronomy, not a group of gunslingers, but a group of neutron stars a few hundred parsecs from Earth. They aren’t near each other, spatially, but they share a number of different properties:

In 2013, a team of astronomers (Braga-Ribas et al. (2014)) observed a star called UCAC4 248–108672. However, they weren’t interested in the star itself, but an object moving in front of the star: a minor planet called 10199 Chariklo. Chariklo is a centaur…