NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has captured the first definitive evidence of high-energy gamma rays coming from a superluminous supernova — one of the most powerful stellar explosions in the universe.

Scientists studying the event SN 2017egm believe its extraordinary brightness is driven by a newborn magnetar, an ultra-dense neutron star spinning at extreme speeds with an intense magnetic field.

The discovery helps explain how these explosions generate enormous amounts of energy and offers a new way to study the physics of collapsing massive stars and the extreme environments created in their aftermath.

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