A magnetar is a kind of dead star with the strongest magnetic field known anywhere in the universe. It is a neutron star, the ...

By studying X-rays coming through a magnetar's extreme magnetic field, astronomers may have confirmed space acting like a ...

A single teaspoon of material scooped from a magnetar would weigh about one hundred million tons, according to the European Space Agency. That figure sounds impossible until you consider what a ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. An illustration shows a ...

Heisenberg said extreme magnetism would make nothingness bend light. A dead star just proved he was right.

Magnetars are some of the most extreme objects we know about, with magnetic fields so strong that chemistry becomes impossible in their vicinity. They’re neutron stars with a superfluid interior that ...

Long ago and far across the universe, an enormous burst of gamma rays unleashed more energy in a half-second than the sun will produce over its entire 10-billion-year lifetime. After examining the ...

Artist’s conception of a magnetar surrounded by an accretion disk that is wobbling, or precessing, because of the effects of general relativity. Some models of magnetars suggest that high-speed jets ...

Like anthropologists piecing together the human family tree, astronomers have found that a misfit “skeleton” of a star may link two different kinds of stellar remains. The mysterious object, called ...

Astronomers just caught a dead star in a distant galaxy throwing a massive temper tantrum. A magnetar in galaxy M82 recently sent a huge burst of gamma rays and other radiation blasting out into space ...

Astronomers have discovered a new kind of star, and with it, a new clue to an old mystery: how magnetars form. The discovery is related to a peculiar star in a binary system some 3,000 light-years ...