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9 December 2013: Stars come in a tremendous size range, from many tens of times bigger than the Sun to a tiny fraction of its size. But the answer to just how small an astronomical body can be, and still be a star, has never been known. What is known is that objects below this limit are unable to ignite and sustain hydrogen fusion in their cores: these objects are referred to as brown dwarfs.

14 November 2006: Astronomers have identified 20 new stellar systems in our local solar neighborhood, including the twenty-third and twenty-fourth closest stars to the Sun. When added to eight other systems announced by this team and six by other groups since 2000, the known population of the Milky Way galaxy within 33 light-years (10 parsecs) of Earth has grown by 16 percent in just the past six years.

13 January 2000: Astronomers, high school teachers and their students have discovered 73 novae in the Andromeda galaxy through a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded education program called "The Use of Astronomy in Research Based Science Education" (RBSE). These results will be presented today by Dr. Travis A. Rector and George H. Jacoby of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), in Tucson, AZ, to the American Astronomical Society meeting in Atlanta, GA. Novae are stellar outbursts that lead to a rapid brightening when mass is transferred between two stars in a binary system, causing the surface layers of one star to ignite explosively from the fusion of hydrogen nuclei.