Astronomers have discovered that the birth of neutron stars with magnetic fields trillions of times stronger than Earth's magnetosphere is the "magic trick" behind superbright supernovas.

Astronomers have for the first time seen the birth of a magnetar—a highly magnetized, spinning neutron star—and confirmed that it's the power source behind some of the brightest exploding stars in the ...

The night sky appears perfectly still, but the universe is constantly changing in ways the human eye cannot see. By combining ...

An artist's impression of a magnetar with a wobbly accretion disk. (Joseph Farah and Curtis McCully) A never-before-seen 'chirp' in the light of an exploding star has revealed new clues about the ...

Some of the most extreme explosions in the universe are Type I superluminous supernovae. “They are one of the brightest ...

This violent fate is rare: fewer than about 1% of stars are big enough to end their lives this way. Indeed, these dramatic explosions only occur in so-called “massive stars”. These are stars with a ...

Maybe music artist Moby was right, and “we are all made of stars.” New research suggests the calcium in our teeth and bones came from star explosions. Researchers from Northwestern University looked ...

Scientists have detected the most distant supernova ever seen, exploding when the universe was less than a billion years old. The event was first signaled by a gamma-ray burst and later confirmed ...

We could go out with a crunch, and not a bang. Contrary to popular belief, our universe may not be constantly expanding after all. A groundbreaking study by South Korean researchers suggests that dark ...

The universe’s expansion might not be accelerating but slowing down, a new study suggests. If confirmed, the finding would upend decades of established astronomical assumptions and rewrite our ...