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 ...

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 ...

Astronomers using data from several X-ray satellites have caught a magnetar – the remnant of a massive star with an incredibly strong magnetic field – in a sort of giant cosmic blench. When it comes ...

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 ...

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 ...

"We know that magnetars exist because we see them in our galaxy. We think most of them are formed in the explosive deaths of ...

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.

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 ...