Astronomers are trying to understand what caused a series of gamma ray bursts, or GRBs — the most powerful explosions in the universe. These energetic bursts are typically unleashed by the incendiary ...

In the early 1930s, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky observed galaxies in space moving faster than their mass should allow, prompting him to infer the presence of some invisible scaffolding—dark ...

A tremendous cosmic explosion 2.4 billion light years away temporarily changed the electric field in Earth’s ionosphere (the electrically-charged upper layer of our atmosphere that helps shield life ...

For over a decade, the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope has mapped a mysterious excess of gamma-ray light in the inner regions of the Milky Way. This unusual glow spans thousands of light-years and ...

image: Maia Williams, a research technologist at Penn State and a member of Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory's Missions Operation Center, was on call the day that the brightest gamma-ray burst ever ...

When faraway stars explode, they send out flashes of energy called gamma-ray bursts that are bright enough that telescopes back on Earth can detect them. Studying these pulses, which can also come ...

A bright flash of gamma rays from the constellation Boötes that lasted nearly one minute came from a kilonova, as we described in a new paper. This finding challenges what astronomers know about some ...

The Milky Way glows with a gamma ray haze, with energies vastly exceeding anything physicists can produce on Earth, according to a new paper. Gamma rays detected in the study, to be published in ...

A bright flash of gamma rays observed March 28 by the Swift satellite may have been the death rattle of a star falling into a massive black hole and being ripped apart, according to a team of ...