Astronomers say S5-HVs1 ventured close to supermassive black hole before being ejected.

Neutron stars cannot exist.

“The sky was clear—remarkably clear—and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.” —Thomas Hardy.

On June 13, 2012 NASA launched the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) on a mission to study X-rays in what are thought to be the remnants of supernova explosions, called pulsars. NuStar joins other X-ray space telescopes like Chandra and XMM-Newton, except that it is capable of focusing X-rays to a sharp point, enabling it to “see” energies up to 79,000 electron-volts. That capability makes it more than 100 times more powerful than the other observatories.

Theoretically, the universe may be riddled with tunnels through space and time. Two scientists have now proposed a way to detect the existence of a cosmic escape hatch.

NASA recently detected a massive thermonuclear explosion coming from outer space.

The culprit seems to be a distant pulsar, the space agency reports, which is the stellar remains of a star that blew up in a supernova but was too small to form a black hole. NASA spotted the burst because it sent out an intense beam of x-rays that got picked up by the agency’s orbital observatory NICER.

All in all, it serves as a potent reminder: space is an extremely dangerous, extremely metal place.