The light did not fade the way it was supposed to. After blazing into view about a billion light-years from Earth, the ...

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

New research suggests that the highly magnetized remnants of stars are responsible for powering some of the universe’s most brilliant supernova explosions ...

In December 2024, astronomers watched a star around 25 times the mass of our sun die in a blaze of glory. Located one billion light-years from Earth, SN 2024afav was a prime example of a superluminous ...

Sixteen years ago, theoretical astrophysicists at UC Berkeley and elsewhere proposed that highly magnetized, spinning neutron stars — magnetars — were the power source behind some superluminous ...

They were too big and too far away to exist by the rules. Now, using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers has finally cracked the chemical code of these distant ...

Researchers found a magnetic star core acting as a high speed engine to power a record breaking luminous supernova.

An international team from China and Italy has reported a possible cosmic encore to the landmark 2017 multi-messenger discovery. In November 2024, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observatories detected ...

Researchers say the "powerful engine" behind superluminous exploding stars had been hidden for years — until a "chirp" from the cosmos helped confirm their link.

Their formation has been an object of debate, but new observations confirm the lead hypothesis: they are the product of incredibly bright supernovae. The rest of this article is behind a paywall.

Some supernovas are even brighter than the normal ones, 10 to 100 times more luminous, called superluminous supernovas.

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 ...