An article published in the journal “Science” describes the really out-of-the-ordinary amount of massive stars discovered in the Tarantula Nebula, a region of the Great Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way’s satellite dwarfs galaxies. A team of researchers participating in the VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey (VFTS) used ESO’s Very Large Telescope to observe nearly 1,000 massive stars in that region concluding that there’s a much higher amount than expected by the models with various important astronomical implications.

An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters” describes the results of new observations of the star KIC 8462852, commonly known as Tabby’s star or sometimes Boyajian’s star. A team of astronomers led by Tabetha S. Boyajian, the astronomer who in 2015 realized that its brightness was changing rapidly, dimming up to 20% within a few days, conducted a research possible thanks to a funding obtained through a campaign on Kickstarter. The conclusions confirm the theory of dust that obscures the star, in particular at certain frequencies.