For decades, astronomers have used distant supernovae as cosmic lighthouses to test fundamental physics and to measure the universe. For Joseph Farah, a fifth-year graduate student at UC Santa Barbara ...

Astronomers have identified the birth of a magnetar, a hyper-magnetized neutron star, by detecting a subtle warping of ...

It was 1905, and Albert Einstein had just turned theoretical physics on its head by publishing a paper on what later became known as special relativity. This showed that space and time could not be ...

In December 2024, astronomers watched a star around 25 times the mass of our sun die in a blaze of glory. Located one billion ...

For years, astronomers have wondered why real-life versions of Tatooine are so rare. With thousands of confirmed exoplanets and countless binary star systems in our galaxy, planets orbiting two suns ...

When black holes collide, the crash generates ripples in the fabric of spacetime—gravitational waves. These distortions travel far out into the universe, but by the time they reach Earth, they have ...

An artist's illustration of a tilted, wobbling disk of material around a rapidly rotating, highly magnetic star (a magnetar) at the center of a superluminous supernova. Credit: Joseph Farah · Curtis ...

The light did not fade the way it was supposed to. After blazing into view about a billion light-years from Earth, the supernova known as SN 2024afav settled into something stranger.