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 ...

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

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.

Imagine looking up at the night sky and seeing a star suddenly burst into a blaze of light brighter than anything nearby. A flash so bright that it briefly outshines an entire galaxy before fading ...

Some of the most extreme explosions in the universe are Type I superluminous supernovae. “They are one of the brightest explosions in the Universe,” says Joseph Farah, an astrophysicist at the ...

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 ...

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