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.

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 ...

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 ...

A team of nuclear physicists has pulled off something that, until recently, existed only in theoretical models and the ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...