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

A supernova - the explosion marking the end of a massive star's life - is one of the brightest cosmic events, usually about a billion times more luminous than the sun.

In December 2024, the ATLAS astronomical survey detected a distant flash of light. It was a supernova, the explosive death of a massive star, located far, far away, roughly a billion light-years away.

Superluminous supernovas are the brightest stellar explosions in the universe. Astronomers may have found a mechanism that can trigger these events.

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 ...

One of the largest known stars in the cosmos is poised for catastrophe. After witnessing the massive object undergo a ...

Asrtronomers managed to pinpoint which star in the NGC 1637 galaxy turned into a supernova 40 million years ago, they used the Webb telescope.

When most people think of a supernova, they're thinking of a Type II core-collapse supernova. These are massive stars that have reached the end of their time on the main sequence. They've used up ...

Astronomers have discovered a strange new signal coming from an exploding star — a “chirp” that speeds up over time, similar to the signals seen when black holes collide. The unusual pattern appeared ...

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, ...

Researchers report superluminous supernova SN 2024afav whose erratic behavior supports a long-standing theory of stellar ...

A Northwestern University-led team of astronomers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to discover a former star that ...