Hubble finds telltale fireball after gamma ray burst

(Phys.org) —NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has provided the strongest evidence yet that short-duration gamma-ray bursts are triggered by the merger of two small, super-dense stellar objects, such as a pair of neutron stars ...

Dark Energy Survey set to seek out supernovae

(Phys.org) —The largest ever search for supernovae – exploding stars up to 10 billion times brighter than the Sun – is beginning this August. For the next five years, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) will look for these ...

NASA decommissions its galaxy hunter spacecraft

(Phys.org) —NASA has turned off its Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) after a decade of operations in which the venerable space telescope used its ultraviolet vision to study hundreds of millions of galaxies across 10 billion ...

Solar splashdown

(Phys.org) —On June 7, 2011, our Sun erupted, blasting tons of hot plasma into space. Some of that plasma splashed back down onto the Sun's surface, sparking bright flashes of ultraviolet light. This dramatic event may ...

Key link found in Cosmic Distance Ladder

(Phys.org) —When observing the bright explosion of a White Dwarf star in our neighbouring galaxy last year, researchers from The Australian National University collected the largest ever data set on what they recognised ...

A hidden population of exotic neutron stars

(Phys.org) —Magnetars – the dense remains of dead stars that erupt sporadically with bursts of high-energy radiation - are some of the most extreme objects known in the Universe. A major campaign using NASA's Chandra ...

Most distant blazar is a high-energy astrophysics puzzle

(Phys.org) —Blazars are the brightest of active galactic nuclei, and many emit very high-energy gamma rays. New observations of the blazar known as PKS 1424+240 show that it is the most distant known source of very high-energy ...

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