Nearly 4.5 million years ago, two enormous, blazing stars swung close to the solar system. They did not touch the sun, but they came close enough to leave a permanent mark on the thin mist of gas that ...

According to scientists, red supergiant stars should produce more supernovas. But astronomers just aren’t spotting them. Here's how they plan to crack the case.

Dark matter, if it exists, is probably in the latter category. If hypothetical weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are real, their collisions with regular matter may have left fossil traces ...

What can imaging supernovae (plural for supernova) explosions teach astronomers about their behavior and physical characteristics? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to ...

Astronomers at Michigan State University and the University of Michigan have teamed up on research that's taken the highest-resolution images to date of star explosions called novae (the plural of ...

The first generation of stars that were born in the universe are a mystery. We can estimate when they existed and even how big they might have gotten, but direct evidence has been lacking. Now, JWST ...

When the Kepler space telescope malfunctioned last spring, it looked as though its incredibly successful planet-hunting mission might be over—and NASA made that sad fact official a few months later.

Neutron stars are the densely compact cores remaining as one possible result of a supernova. These star remnants are ...

In recent years, whenever astronomers have gazed into the night sky, they’ve noticed something peculiar: Some of its massive stars—the true titans of the cosmos—appear to be missing. The largest of ...