A new study explains how some supernovas are particularly dazzling—the glow from a magnetic, spinning ball of neutrons called a magnetar. An assist from Einstein is what settled the case ...

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 ...

A rare gravitationally lensed supernova could help astronomers determine how fast the universe is expanding and shed light on dark energy. Astronomers may be closer to understanding one of the ...

Superluminous supernovas, or ultra-bright cosmic explosions, have puzzled scientists for years. Recent studies of a supernova a billion light-years away reveal that a magnetar, a dense neutron star, ...

That the universe is expanding has been known for almost a hundred years now, but how fast? The exact rate of that expansion remains hotly debated, even challenging the standard model of cosmology. A ...

An extraordinarily rare, gravitationally lensed supernova may offer a powerful new way to measure the universe’s expansion rate.

A cosmic mystery surrounding the universe's most dazzling explosions, superluminous supernovas, appears to have been solved by scientists studying a colossal stellar event a billion light-years from ...

A rare gravitationally lensed supernova called SN 2025wny appears in five separate images due to the gravity of two ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

An international team of astronomers, working with researchers from University College Dublin and other institutions, has detected a supernova from an era once thought far beyond reach. Using the ...

Every star’s death is dramatic. Superluminous supernovae take the theatrics to another level. In the early 2000s, scientists first saw these conspicuous cataclysms, which can shine much longer and ...