“Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyards specters, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again forever.” —H. Rider Haggard When we think about the universe, it simply seems vast with boundless space filled with large and minute…

WASHINGTON—Supernovas are not always so super. These explosions that mark the death of a star often are spectacularly energetic. But once in a while they are a complete dud. Scientists on Wednesday detailed one of the duds—a massive star that had so much of its material siphoned off by the gravitational tug of a companion…

Scanning the skies from Down Under, a team of astronomers detected an enigmatic burst of radio energy unlike anything that has been seen before. Thousands of light-years away, a distant object smaller than our sun was observed emitting pulsating radio light, which was not strange itself; what was unique about these intermittent flashes was the…

A dying red supergiant star, 10 times more massive than our sun, has collapsed—and for the first time ever, Earth observatories have imaged a Type II supernova explosion in real time. Astronomers at Hawaii’s Keck Observatory in the summer of 2020 were conducting the Young Supernova Experiment (YSE) transient survey when a bright light emanating from a…