Astronomers find a golden glow from a distant stellar collision

On August 17, 2017, scientists made history with the first direct observation of a merger between two neutron stars. It was the first cosmic event detected in both gravitational waves and the entire spectrum of light, from ...

Moon glows brighter than sun in images from NASA's Fermi

If our eyes could see high-energy radiation called gamma rays, the Moon would appear brighter than the Sun! That's how NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has seen our neighbor in space for the past decade.

Powering the extreme jets of active galaxies

An active galaxy nucleus (AGN) contains a supermassive black hole that is vigorously accreting material. It typically ejects jets of particles that move at close to the speed of light, radiating across many wavelengths, in ...

Researchers connect lightning with gamma-ray phenomena in clouds

University of Tokyo graduate student Yuuki Wada with colleagues from Japan have discovered a connection between lightning strikes and two kinds of gamma-ray phenomena in thunderclouds. The research suggests that in certain ...

Gamma-ray blazars in the sky

When the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies accrete material, they can eject powerful jets of charged particles at speeds approaching that of light. These particles in turn emit radiation across the electromagnetic ...

The orderly chaos of black holes

During the formation of a black hole, a bright burst of very energetic light in the form of gamma rays is produced, these events are called gamma ray bursts. The physics behind this phenomenon includes many of the least understood ...

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