Ecuadorian authorities say 50 guards and seven police officers were released more than a day after they were taken hostages in different prisons, in what the government described as a response by criminal groups to its efforts to regain control of several large correctional facilities in the South American country

Oprah Winfrey has spoken about her weight loss journey in the past and revealed she was going to 'reset' her eating habits

President Joe Biden on Friday acknowledged he's facing an unwelcome political obstacle: The disarray engulfing his political opponents has only made it more difficult for his message to break through.

Joe Rogan and comedians Matt McCusker and Shane Gillis discussed divorce comparing it to a 'miserable endeavor'

The British government is resisting an order to hand over a sheaf of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s personal messages to the country’s COVID-19 pandemic inquiry

Efforts by France to build a consensus for a global carbon tax on the shipping industry failed to produce significant results at a...

Bob Huggins says he never resigned as West Virginia’s basketball coach following a drunken-driving arrest and wants his job back

Carlee Russell has confessed to cooking up the story that she was kidnapped on July 13

'Kelly Preston will always be the only woman for him. It's sad, but he's essentially taken a vow of celibacy for the rest of his life,' said a source

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.

Hank Green has generous earnings through his several social media channels

By Jack Queen and Luc Cohen NEW YORK (Reuters) -Donald Trump and his onetime lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen faced