With Wednesday's CNN town hall behind him, former President Donald Trump remains both the prohibitive GOP front-runner for the 2024 nomination and a man who was found liable this week in a civil case for sexually abusing and defaming former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll.

The previous management team at Brazilian retailer Americanas SA carried out fraudulent accounting practices and hid them from

The top two contestants in the Pogchamps 5 tournament will compete face-to-face in Los Angeles

China's booming electric vehicle industry is fuelling a lithium rush in the Tibetan plateau that risks damaging the troubled region's fragile ecology and deepening rights...

By Sarah Mills LONDON "Mission Impossible" star Simon Pegg and Brian Cox from "Succession" joined a rally in

Astronomers have discovered a new way that stars can die. In a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, experts have worked out that a minute-long gamma-ray burst of light, which occured in 2019 and evidence a star dying, happened because stars collided within the densely crowded environment near the supermassive black hole at the centre of an ancient galaxy. Normally gamma-ray bursts (GRB) last around two seconds and happen when stars collapse. “For every hundred events that fit into the traditional classification scheme of gamma-ray bursts, there is at least one oddball that throws us for a loop,” said study coauthor Wen-fai Fong, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, in a statement. “However, it is these oddballs that tell us the most about the spectacular diversity of explosions that the universe is capable of.” Over time, astronomers have observed three main ways that stars can die, depending on their size. Lower mass stars like our sun shed their outer layers as they age, eventually becoming dead white dwarf stars. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Massive stars burn through the fuel-like elements at their core and shatter in explosions called supernovas. Doing so can leave behind dense remnants like neutron stars or result in the creation of black holes. A third form of star death results when neutron stars or black holes begin to orbit one another in a binary system and spiral closer to one another until they collide and explode. But the new observation suggests a fourth type of death. “Our results show that stars can meet their demise in some of the densest regions of the universe, where they can be driven to collide,” said lead study author Andrew Levan, an astrophysics professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands, in a statement. “This is exciting for understanding how stars die and for answering other questions, such as what unexpected sources might create gravitational waves that we could detect on Earth.” “The lack of a supernova accompanying the long GRB 191019A tells us that this burst is not a typical massive star collapse,” said study coauthor Jillian Rastinejad, a doctoral student of astronomy at Northwestern, in a statement. “The location of GRB 191019A, embedded in the nucleus of the host galaxy, teases a predicted but not yet evidenced theory for how gravitational-wave emitting sources might form.” “While this event is the first of its kind to be discovered, it’s possible there are more out there that are hidden by the large amounts of dust close to their galaxies,” said Fong, who is also a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics at Northwestern. “Indeed, if this long-duration event came from merging compact objects, it contributes to the growing population of GRBs that defies our traditional classifications.” You learn something new every day. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

US and Canadian officials are looking into what went wrong in a commercial deep-sea adventure and whether crimes

In 2004, Tina Turner flew all the way from Switzerland to perform on 'The Oprah Winfrey Show' to celebrate Oprah's 50th birthday

GENEVA At least 87 people including ethnic Masalits were buried in a mass grave in Sudan's West Darfur,

German leaders are strongly denouncing a rise in antisemitism in Germany in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war

Florida is bracing for "major impact" as Tropical Storm Idalia is expected to rapidly strengthen into a powerful Category 3 hurricane and aim for its Gulf Coast, threatening dangerous storm surge and winds, authorities said.

Michigan's Democratic-controlled state legislature gave final approval this week to a pair of bills that would ban so-called conversion therapy for minors, joining other blue states in advancing protections for the LGBTQ community this legislative session.