On the outskirts of the Milky Way, one of the rarest kinds of stars in the galaxy has just become even more mysterious than it was before. Astronomers have used the Hubble and Gaia telescopes to study ...

Magnetars are a class of neutron stars with the strongest magnetic fields in the Universe. These incredibly dense objects are central in the landscape of extreme phenomena such as hypernovae, fast ...

Astronomers believe they have found a rare, massive flare that erupted from an extremely magnetic dead star, or magnetar, that was bright enough to illuminate an entire galaxy. If true, the discovery ...

A magnetar known to scientists for 17 years might not have come from a supernova, like the rest of its ultra-magnetic brethren. But where did it form, then? The Hubble Space Telescope is on the case.

In a stunning cosmological find, astronomers saw an ultra-massive and magnetic stellar remnant speeding through our galaxy at record speed. Called a "zombie star," the object—properly known as SGR ...

Gamma rays are a broad category of high-energy photons, including everything with more energy than an X-ray. While they are often created by processes like radioactive decay, few astronomical events ...

A flash of high-energy radiation that rippled through space in December 2004 may have quietly rewritten part of the story for how the universe forges its heaviest elements — including gold, platinum ...

What can magnetized stars, commonly called magnetars, teach astronomers about the distribution of heavy elements throughout the universe? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical ...

Astronomers from the University of Leicester, UK, have seen the signature of a magnetar in 11 gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) observed by the Swift satellite. The team, led by Leicester Professor Paul O’Brien ...