Forget building gravitational wave detectors costing hundreds of millions of dollars (I’m looking at you, LIGO), make use of the most accurate cosmic timekeepers instead and save a bundle. The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) is a proposal that involves...

Could quark stars be magnetar progenitors? (© Mark Garlick*) If you thought neutron stars and magnetars were exotic, think again. In studies of magnetars that occasionally blink to life, generating an intense blast of X-rays and gamma-rays, astronomers have been at a loss to explain why these objects...

An artist impression of one of the most intensely magnetic phenomena in our known Universe, the magnetar (ESO/L. Calcada) It was identified as a gamma-ray burst, resulting from a massive explosion in a distant, young galaxy. Then astronomers realised that this flaring object was much closer to home,...