Stars that vanish from the sky may be collapsing directly into black holes without going supernova first, a new study of a bizarre binary star system suggests.

Magnetars are neutron stars with the universe's most powerful magnetic fields, often hundreds of trillions of times more powerful than Earth's magnetosphere.. Low-field magnetars, first discovered ...

The star is a white dwarf — the shriveled husk of a sun-like star that burned off most of its fuel before collapsing. For stars with cores made mostly of metallic oxygen and carbon, the cooling ...

The stars' collision certainly didn't occur that night—instead, it occurred 5.47 billion years ago, and its light had just reached Earth, according to a press release.

An animation shows how a series of supernovas beginning 14 million years ago created the Local Bubble, a cavity of very thin, hot gas in our sun's corner of the Milky Way.