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 'chirp' in the light of an exploding star has revealed new clues about the ...

Betelgeuse is one of the closest stars to Earth, at a distance of only 650 light-years away. This makes Betelgeuse a fan-favorite with professional and amateur astronomers alike. Betelgeuse is a red ...

A recently detected flash of energy appears to have emanated from the wreckage of colliding galaxies, according to an international team of astronomers led by Penn State scientists. The burst, known ...

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 ...

Modern astrophysics has revealed a universe filled with black holes, neutron stars, hypernova explosions, and vast cosmic structures. Yet scientists believe that about 95% of the universe is made of ...

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 ...