Astronomers have been aware of cosmic vampires, dead stars that hungrily strip plasma from victim stars, for some time. New ...

The Little Dipper is an asterism in the larger constellation of Ursa Minor, the Little Bear. Asterisms are patterns of stars of similar brightness. The stars may be part of a larger constellation ...

Whether you call it the Plough or the Big Dipper – or even the saucepan, the panhandle or the wagon – the stars that form this asterism are ones I think many people learn to recognise from an ...

Two stars in the Big Dipper’s pot section opposite the handle, Dubhe and Merak, can point you to Polaris, otherwise known as the North Star.

Alcor, a star in the middle of the Big Dipper's handle, has a newly found red dwarf companion (circled in green). Project 1640 astronomers discovered the faint star by blocking out almost all of ...

Going back to the Big Dipper, if we follow the curve of the Dipper's handle past its end star for about 30 degrees ("three fists"), you'll come to a brilliant star — in rank, the fourth ...

A star in the Big Dipper is an intergalactic alien, according to clues in its chemical fingerprints. The star's unusual chemistry is unlike that of all known stars in the Milky Way and instead has ...

The seven brightest stars of the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear, form this well-known asterism which is known as the Big Dipper. Photograph by Jamie Cooper.

This week, as darkness descends, the stars of the Big Dipper are almost directly overhead. Next to Orion, the Dipper is probably the most impressive group of stars in our sky. Here we have seven ...

Predicting that the Big Dipper in the northern sky will lose its form within 50,000 years, due to a shifting of the stars, Sidney W. McCuskey, assistant in Astronomy, opened the annual series of ...

Even if you’re new to stargazing, no doubt you’ve seen the seven bright stars that outline the Big Dipper, and this time of year they’re easy to find. As soon as it’s dark enough after ...