Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. What is the bright white star in the east right now?

Astronomers have captured a first-of-its-kind image of a massive dying star. Just 26 hours after the supernova SN 2024ggi was first detected in April 2024, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) ...

The sun is the biggest object in the solar system; at about 865,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers) across, it's more than 100 times wider than Earth. Despite being enormous, our star is often called a ...

For decades, astronomers have been watching WOH G64, an enormous heavyweight star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy visible with the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere. This star is more ...

It’s “common knowledge”—and the scare quotes should be a warning—that the sun is an average star. But it’s not, and in fact it’s not even close: The sun is in the top 90th percentile of stars by mass.