Astronomers believe they have found a rare, massive flare erupting from a highly magnetic dead star, or magnetar, bright enough to illuminate the entire galaxy. If true, the discovery would represent the first sighting of gamma rays from a “recently deceased” neutron star that exploded outside the Milky Way. The flare was first detected by… Read More »
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists have finally unraveled the mysterious origins of “BOAT,” possibly the largest cosmic explosion since the Big Bang. The brightest gamma-ray burst of all time (hence the acronym Brightest of All Time), a.k.a. BOAT, appears to have been launched by a supernova explosion accompanying the death and collapse… Read More »
NASA has officially halted scientific observations conducted by the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. Do not worry. The space telescope, which observes some of the most powerful bursts of radiation from the universe’s most violent cosmic events, known as “gamma-ray bursts,” is only temporarily out of service. NASA put Swift into safe mode on March 15… Read More »
Scientists may have found evidence that vampire black holes feeding on victim stars called microquasars are cosmic particle accelerators responsible for the mysterious high-energy cosmic rays we see bombarding Earth. These stellar-mass black holes are found in binary systems with a supergiant star from which they greedily rob matter. Some of this stellar material is… Read More »
Astronomers have discovered an unexpected and unexplained feature outside our Milky Way galaxy that emits high-energy light called gamma rays. The team behind the discovery, including NASA and University of Maryland cosmologist Alexander Kashlinsky, found the gamma ray signal while searching through 13 years of data from NASA’s Fermi Telescope. “This is a completely accidental… Read More »
The Fermi gamma-ray space telescope discovered nearly 300 rapidly rotating neutron stars. Each of the newly discovered objects scans two beams of radiation across the universe like a cosmic lighthouse. These neutron stars are known to rotate hundreds of times per second and are specifically called millisecond pulsars; Before Fermi’s launch in 2008, humanity was… Read More »