Man, human babies have it easy. All they have to endure is the trauma of being forced out of a uterus. You know what stars have to deal with when they're being born? Massive amounts of nebula cloud gas being violently twisted by radiation and coalescing into exploding balls of fire. At least they're pretty, though, right?

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Contrary to what Inspector Javert might believe, stars don't fill the darkness with order and light because they are the sentinels of the sky. They actually do it because of this thing called science. Though we bet Javert would appreciate a lot of things about science, too. It's very neat and orderly sometimes.

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Apparently two are better than one. New research shows that binary stars keep each other in check and increase a moon's chances of hosting life.

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Celine Semaan Vernon of Slow Factory had the best idea ever - create pretty scarves using open source NASA images as your base. I'm seriously in love.

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Move over sun, there may be a bigger star to steal the spotlight. Recent studies suggest that hotter and brighter stars are capable of providing the right conditions to form life.

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By combining the data from the Planck and Herschel satellites, four super old galaxies clusters were recently discovered, and by super old, we mean 10 billion light-years away. They're galaxy clusters, which means that they're a massive cloud of other galaxies.

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You've heard the expression "stars in your eyes," right? Well how about "planets on your eyes?" No? You're right, that's probably weird. But these Milky Way-inspired baked shadows from BH Cosmetics are totally cool. Hit the jump to see if they picked appropriate colors for each planet.

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Redditor Boothin shared this shawl their wife made by tweaking one pattern and combining it with another. The end result was a beautiful and cozy garment that is also an accurate map of our sky as seen from the North Pole. By all means, join me in the Jealous Corner.

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If Hercules hadn't been made into a constellation, he would probably have been reborn in space as a recently discovered star: the largest one ever spotted in the Milky Way. A group of astronomers found the embryonic star, which is still forming inside of a huge cloud about 10,000 light years away from Earth, using the ultra-powerful ALMA(Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array) telescope. Now that they're getting a good look at the massive star, researchers have been able to learn some new lessons about how stars this size are born.

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Space flares are so friggin' cool. Well, not literally, because they are giant eruptions of heat and light, but you get my meaning. Case in point? Astrophysicists at the University of Santiago do Compostela in Spain, along with the Byurakan Observatory in Amernia, detected a low-intensity star letting out a flare so strong it became almost 15 times brighter in a matter of minutes. You know that feeling you get when you wake up in the middle of the night and almost blind yourself with your phone while checking the time? Imagine that, but, like, times a billion. In space.

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We love explosions, don't we? Especially when they're a) on TV or b) very far away from us. In this case, crazy far away, because I'm talking about supernovas -- those spectacular events wherein a star dies and then has a cosmic funeral in the form of a massive explosion visible to the edge of the universe itself. Now astronomers have discovered a new variety of stellar explosion that's...much smaller. It's potentially even adorable. A kind of supernova that is so weak that the star itself survives it.

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Oscar Wilde famously wrote "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars," and it turns out he might have really hit the nail on the head. After all, you don't get much more in the gutter than dung beetles, a species of insect famed for making balls of other animals droppings, and it turns out those humble creatures are avid stargazers. In fact, without a night sky and the Milky Way above them, the insects seem to get lost and are unable to move in a straight line.

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Full disclosure -- there is very little we like waking up to better than pretty pictures of space. There's just something really soothing about images that are simultaneously extremely gorgeous and throw into stark relief our astonishing insignificance in the cosmic scheme of things -- it just makes us want to crawl right back under the covers in the best possible way. It's in this spirit that we bring you this latest picture from the European Southern Observatory's MPG/ESO telescope -- the best image ever captured of Lupus 3, a star forming cloud some 600 light-years from Earth that you can take a closer look at in the video below.

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Some of the oldest celestial bodies in our known universe are stars. And we don't mean that name-forgetting and license-revoking kind of old, we're talking about way before the first single-cell organism decided to start splitting in that puddle of primordial ooze. But for all our technological advancements in the field of astronomy, it can be difficult at times to accurately pinpoint the exact age of a particular star, since such efforts can take exhaustive years of constant analysis. Over an eight year period between 2003 to 2011 utilizing the Hubble Space Telescope’s Fine Guidance Sensors, astronomers have concluded that the star designated HD 140283 is the oldest star out in space -- and even more surprising is the fact that neighbors our very solar system.

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We all have plenty of things to worry about and be frightened by in the course of a given day. Paying the bills, getting to work on time, making sure we don't step in front of a bus while texting. Apparently, though, researchers at Penn State University think we could all use one more thing to have anxiety over: The Earth will eventually be swallowed by our own slowly dying sun, just as the red giant star BD+48 740 did to one of its planets. It's the first time that astronomers have been able to observe, in some way, the consumption of a planet by its aging star. Sure, that fate is probably 5 billion years in the future for the Earth, when we'll all be long in the ground, but knowing it certainly doesn't make us sleep any more soundly right now.

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We may not know everything about the universe, but we have made a lot of observations and drawn some pretty good conclusions from them. One such conclusion was that binary stars could not have orbits under five hours, lest they fuse into one body. However, a new study focusing on dim red dwarf stars has shattered this notion, and may very well challenge our whole notion of how binary stars form.

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So, last weekend, after that friendly little breeze took out the power of millions, including the homes of your faithful editors, one of the (very few) good things to come out of it was a dark, dark neighborhood, free of light pollution, freeing up a gorgeous starry display in the night sky. I kinda wish I could see that more often, but I'd also prefer my food not to spoil in a warming refrigerator. The little girl in this short from Belgian animation students Aveline Stoquart and David Duvieusart has a similar wish, and is lucky enough to see her starry night appear. (Kuriositas)

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