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.

WASHINGTON — 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. But some — a small ...

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 ...

A never-before-seen 'chirp' in the light of an exploding star has revealed new clues about the engine powering some of the brightest supernovae in the Universe. According to an an ...

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

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

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 ...

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

New studies reveal how metallicity and stellar evolution determine whether massive stars expand into red supergiants prior to ...

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 ...