On April 25, one of our nearest stellar neighbors, a small, faint red dwarf known as EV Lacertae, unleashed the brightest flare ever detected from a normal star outside our solar system. The monster blast of radiation was picked up with NASA's Swift satellite, which scans space looking for Gamma-ray bursts coming from the edge of the universe.

Astronomers have made the best determination of the power of a supernova explosion long after it was visible from Earth. This technique, using X-ray and optical observations, may help reveal the details of how some stars come to a cataclysmic death.

Like something out of a Robert Louis Stevenson novel, researchers at NASA and McGill University discovered an otherwise normal pulsar which violently transformed itself temporarily into a magnetar, a stellar metamorphosis never observed before.

Picture a cool place, teeming with a multitude of hot bodies twirling about in rapidly changing formations of singles and couples, partners and groups, constantly dissolving and reforming.

In just the past six weeks, two supernovae have flared up in an obscure galaxy in the constellation Hercules. Never before have astronomers observed two of these powerful stellar explosions occurring in the same galaxy so close together in time.

ESA's X-ray observatory XMM-Newton has revealed a new class of exploding stars - where the X-ray emission 'lives fast and dies young'.