Tag: star

ScienceDaily (May 21, 2010) The hottest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy may also be its shortest-lived world.
The doomed planet is being eaten by its parent star, according to observations made by a new instrument on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS).
The planet may only have another 10 million years left before it is completely devoured.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 26, 2010) As many as one quarter of the star clusters in our Milky Way -- many more than previously thought -- are invaders from other galaxies, according to a new study.
The report also suggests there may be as many as six dwarf galaxies yet to be discovered within the Milky Way rather than the two that were previously confirmed.

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ScienceDaily (Dec. 15, 2009) Dying, for stars, has just gotten more complicated.

For some stellar objects, the final phase before or instead of collapsing into a black hole may be what a group of physicists is calling an electroweak star.

Glenn Starkman, a professor of physics at Case Western Reserve University, together with former graduate students and post-docs De-Chang Dai and Dejan Stojkovic, now at the State University of New York in Buffalo, and Arthur Lue, at MIT's Lincoln Lab, offer a description of the structure of an electroweak star in a paper submitted to Physical Review Letters.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 13, 2009) In ancient times, people with exceptional vision discovered that one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper was, in fact, two stars so close together that most people cannot distinguish them. The two stars, Alcor and Mizar, were the first binary stars -- a pair of stars that orbit each other -- ever known.

Modern telescopes have since found that Mizar is itself a pair of binaries, revealing what was once thought of as a single star to be four stars orbiting each other. Alcor has been sometimes considered a fifth member of the system, orbiting far away from the Mizar quadruplet.

Actors are salesmen. Stories, characters, movies are their products, and they are the packaging and the pitch. That makes film stars the industry's supersalesmen. And no one closes a deal with more assurance or grace than George Clooney.

Not that all his pictures are blockbusters. Since The Perfect Storm in 2000, only his Ocean's (Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen) capers have topped $100 million at the domestic box office. But at 48, Clooney--handsome and affable, with a wit that can deftly cut as it charms--is surely the modern idea and ideal of stardom. Whereas other celebrities seem tortured by the public attention their work earns them, he positively bathes in it.
Remember what Mel Brooks as Louis XVI proclaimed in History of the World, Part I? "It's good to be the King." Clooney must think it's fun to be a star.

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Johnny Depp was named People magazine's "sexiest man alive" for a second time on Wednesday, joining an elite club of double honorees that includes George Clooney and Brad Pitt.

People magazine described the swashbuckling "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie star as "the king of cool with the killer cheekbones". Depp, who also took the title in 2003, succeeded 2008 winner Hugh Jackman.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Funnyman Will Ferrell and British actor Ewan McGregor on Wednesday headed a Forbes.com list of Hollywood's most overpaid stars when looking at the financial returns of their movies.

Billy Bob Thornton, Tom Cruise and Jim Carrey also made the top 10 tally of actors who cost more to hire than they appear to be worth at box offices.

LOS ANGELES/NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - Keanu Reeves is about to develop a split personality as the star of a modern retelling of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

Universal Pictures is developing the feature, with Justin Haythe, writer of "Revolutionary Road," penning the script. Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, writer-director of the "Pusher" trilogy of gritty thrillers, is in negotiations to direct the project, titled "Jekyll."