Astronomers have discovered a new kind of star, and with it, a new clue to an old mystery: how magnetars form. The discovery is related to a peculiar star in a binary system some 3,000 light-years ...

New observations are challenging a hypothesis about what produces these energetic bursts of radio waves. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it ...

Strange radio signals coming from a magnetar that "woke up" after more than a decade of radio silence cannot be explained by our current understanding of the universe's strongest magnets, hinting at a ...

Gregory Desvignes received funding from European Research Council (ERC) Synergy Grant “BlackHoleCam” Grant Agreement Number 610058. Patrick Weltevrede receives funding from Science and Technology ...

Stars are big hot balls of plasma, but astronomers have now spotted a super strange one that seems to have a solid surface. Its intense magnetic field is strong enough to overcome its blistering ...

Observations and stellar evolution models of a hot, helium-rich Wolf-Rayet star indicate that it will produce a magnetar when it explodes as a supernova, according to a new study. The findings provide ...

After a decade of silence, one of the most powerful magnets in the universe suddenly burst back to life in late 2018. The reawakening of this “magnetar”, a city-sized star named XTE J1810-197 born ...

Stars could be sliced in half by "relativistic blades," or ultra-powerful outflows of plasma shaped by extremely strong magnetic fields, an unpublished paper claims. When you purchase through links on ...

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 ...