Variable stars are a lot like macaroni salad. They’re commonplace, and yet most observers barely notice them. Red supergiants such as Betelgeuse irregularly change brightness by unpredictably growing ...

A celestial sleight-of-hand is underway. The bright star Epsilon (ε) Aurigae began to dim this summer. Bit by bit, it will darken by almost a full magnitude on the astronomical brightness scale, ...

Ever since I was a youngster, I’ve been fascinated by how crime scene investigators can reconstruct a crime with such amazing accuracy from relatively scant evidence. They don’t have the luxury of ...

An artist's image of the Epsilon Aurigae system, with a dusty disk swirling around a companion star. For nearly 200 years, astronomers have puzzled over the strange dimming process of the bright ...

For the first time, astronomers have directly observed the mysterious dark companion in a binary star system that has puzzled skywatchers since the 19th century. For the first time, astronomers have ...

A super-bright star is gradually going dim, and scientists want YOU to help them find out why. For nearly 200 years, astronomers have been wondering why the star epsilon Aurigae turns down its light ...

Epsilon Aurigae is one of the few stars that you can see with your own eyes, even in the washed out, big-city sky. It's big and very bright — except when it isn't. Sometimes, it's just not there.

Ever since I was a youngster, I’ve been fascinated by how crime scene investigators can reconstruct a crime with such amazing accuracy from relatively scant evidence. They don’t have the luxury of ...

For nearly 200 years, astronomers have puzzled over the strange dimming process of the bright winter star Epsilon Aurigae. Now, thanks to precise distance measurements from the European Space Agency's ...