ESA’s Integral gamma-ray observatory has discovered a new, highly populated class of X-ray fast ‘transient’ binary stars, undetected in previous observations. With this discovery, Integral confirms ...

Black holes — remnants of collapsed stars — have immense mass that curves spacetime so all paths lead inward. They also ...

A strange X-ray beacon from deep space has revived a decades-old mystery and opened a window onto one of the universe’s most violent possibilities. Astronomers now suspect that this flicker in the ...

Neutron stars—the dense remnants of massive stellar explosions—and their presence in X‐ray binaries serve as natural laboratories for extreme physics. In these systems, matter is transferred from a ...

The X-ray-emitting binary system Cygnus X-3 features a massive star donating matter to a compact object, probably a black hole. That may explain its perplexing brightness. When you purchase through ...

X-ray binaries are intriguing systems consisting of two celestial bodies: a normal star and a compact, dead object such as a black hole or a neutron star that sucks material from its stellar companion ...

In context: Binary systems composed of a supermassive black hole and a much smaller singularity orbiting around it are crucial for studying gravitational wave events. Detecting them, however, is ...

Imagine two stars with winds so powerful that they eject an Earth’s worth of material roughly once every month. Next, imagine those two winds colliding head-on. Such titanic collisions produce ...

High-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs) constitute a crucial class of astrophysical systems in which a massive, early-type star transfers matter to a compact object—commonly a neutron star or black hole—via ...

The strong gravity of the black hole (shown as a small black dot at the center of the disk on the right) pulls gas from the companion star (left). As the gas spirals inward, it forms a ...