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.

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 identified the first clear evidence of a magnetar forming during a superluminous supernova, offering new insight into some of the brightest explosions in the universe.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Last year, our most detailed map of the universe yet suggested our understanding of dark energy has been wrong for decades. The shock result is reigniting the search for a better cosmic story ...