Chandra X-ray Observatory data revealed a short-lived X-ray flare, designated XT2, consistent with predictions for a neutron star merger resulting in a magnetar. XT2's characteristics, including its ...

Neutron stars—the dense remnants of massive stellar explosions—and their presence in X‐ray binaries serve as natural laboratories for extreme physics. In these systems, matter is transferred from a ...

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 ...

Michelle Starr is CNET's science editor, and she hopes to get you as enthralled with the wonders of the universe as she is. When she's not daydreaming about flying through space, she's daydreaming ...

Astronomers have detected a rare pattern in the X-ray bursts coming from a neutron-star system no more than 16,300 light-years away. That star system, MAXI J1621−501, first turned up on Oct. 9, 2017, ...

A look at the pulsar within the Crab Nebula indicates that it's pulsing radiation at much higher energies than we expected—and it could change our understanding of pulsars. A few layman questions ...

Scientists confirm that two neutron stars merging into each other do not only generate gravitational waves. They also emit short gamma-ray bursts. In 2017, an international collaboration of ...

In the middle of the Cold War, the film company found a surprising way to harness weapons-grade uranium.

A bright flash of gamma rays from the constellation Boötes that lasted nearly one minute came from a kilonova, as we described in a new paper. This finding challenges what astronomers know about some ...

Analysis of data from a lightning mapper and a small, hand-held radiation detector has unexpectedly shed light on what a gamma-ray burst from lightning might look like - by observing neutrons ...

It's been three years since the landmark detection of a neutron star merger from gravitational waves. Since that day, an international team of astronomers has been continuously monitoring the ...