The longest gamma-ray burst ever recorded did not behave like a quick cosmic flash. Instead, it burned across the sky for more than seven hours, forcing astronomers to rethink what powers the universe ...

Astronomers are trying to understand what caused a series of gamma ray bursts, or GRBs — the most powerful explosions in the universe. These energetic bursts are typically unleashed by the incendiary ...

The collision of two lightning-bolts-in-the-making spawned an exceedingly brief but extremely energetic flash of gamma rays. This first-of-its-kind observation may help explain an origin of some of ...

NASA’s high-flying ER-2 airplane carries instrumentation in this artist’s impression of the ALOFT mission to record gamma rays (colored purple for illustration) from thunderclouds. There’s more to ...

Above the cloud tops, thunderstorms throb with a complex, frenetic light show of high-energy radiation. A view from a retrofitted spy plane soaring at 20 kilometers up revealed storms glowing and ...