In March, a brief flash of X-rays lit up the sky in a distant galaxy. It lasted only moments, but it carried a profound message: a star had just begun to die.Get breaking news anytime, anywhere.

Astronomers caught a massive star exploding 500 million light-years away almost from the moment the event began. A brief ...

In our galaxy, a supernova explodes about once or twice each century. But historical astronomical records show that the last Milky Way core-collapse supernova seen by humans was about 1,000 years ago.

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 ...