An artist's impression of a magnetar with a wobbly accretion disk. (Joseph Farah and Curtis McCully) A never-before-seen ...

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 ...

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.

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

The violent collision of two neutron stars is providing new insights on how the universe’s heaviest elements were created.

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 ...

Engineers work slowly around a partially assembled spacecraft in a spotless lab at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in ...