energy release

The agony of a solitary black hole lasts forever. But in its final moments, as its mass evaporates according to the law discovered by Hawking, it manages to send a radio farewell signal. Not a quantum whisper, but a classical hum — if only there's a magnetic field nearby.

In the quiet of cold molecular clouds, where interstellar gas under gravity condenses into dense clumps, the birth of massive stars is one of the great puzzles of astrophysics.

Blazars are long-lasting beams from black holes at the centers of galaxies. Gamma-ray bursts are the briefest flashes from supernova explosions or neutron star mergers. The former act like eternal spotlights, the latter like camera flashes.

A shockwave erupts from the star's surface, and for a brief moment, a blinding flash of ultraviolet and X-rays is born. This very event, named EP260321a, was spotted by the Einstein space telescope in March 2026. The light took about 450 million years to reach Earth.

A massive star ends its life in a spectacular collapse: the core compresses into a neutron star or a black hole, while the outer layers fly off in a dazzling supernova.

When many excited atoms are gathered together, they often fire light in concert, like a crowd clapping in rhythm. This well-known phenomenon is called Dicke superradiance. But the authors of the new study asked: what happens if the atoms are not identical and each one feels its neighbors?

A stream of scorching gas races away from a star, and suddenly stalls, as if it hit an invisible wall. That's exactly what researchers saw when they tried to reproduce a stellar eruption on a laboratory scale. They used a laser to create a plasma jet and shot it through a magnetic field — first weak, then strong, like that of many stars.

Massive stars end their lives in a colossal explosion, which Fritz Zwicky called a supernova. The core crushes down into a black hole or a neutron star.

When a bright spot flares up on a star, astronomers want to know how much energy was released into space. They used to picture a flare as a growing campfire: the area of the fire increases, but the heat remains the same. That made calculations simpler, but reality turned out to be different.

A quasar is a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy that devours matter and shines brighter than all the stars around it. Some of that energy goes into radio emission, which, it was thought, could heat or expel cold gas — the raw material for new stars.

The red dwarf V374 Pegasi is a star one-third the size of the Sun, but with the temperament of a volcano. Every few hours, giant clumps of plasma tear away from its surface, like steam bubbles from a boiling cauldron. These ejections, called prominences, fly off into space and generate bursts of radio waves.

Ultracold atoms can act as one. When a neutrino is born inside such a cloud, it usually slips away unnoticed.

On October 9, 2022, detectors on Earth recorded a gamma-ray burst of unprecedented power. GRB 221009A was so bright that its radiation ionized the upper layers of the ionosphere, and satellite instruments were temporarily blinded.

In the quiet harbor of the Local Bubble, a rarefied cavity of hot gas around the Sun, an explosion recently thundered. A supernova went off tens of parsecs away, and its echo still lingers in the neighborhood, reshaping the cosmic-ray landscape.