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Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) on Wednesday decried the standard of Republicans who surround him in Congress, lamenting “America is not sending their best and brightest, you know, to Washington, DC.” Fetterman made the despairing revelation during an interview with Stephen Colbert after being complimented on his “excellent meme game” during a broadcast of “The Late Show.” Colbert asked Fetterman if it was awkward seeing people he’s “put up a devastating meme about” around the Capitol. “You all should need to know that America is not sending their best and brightest to Washington, DC,” replied Fetterman.

For most of 2016, astronomers have been viewing a ball of hot gas billions of light years away that is radiating the energy of hundreds of billions of suns. At its heart is an object a little larger than 10 miles across. And astronomers are not entirely sure what it is. If, as they suspect, the gas ball is the result of a supernova, then it’s the most powerful supernova ever seen. Most astronomers today believe that one of the plausible reasons we have yet to detect intelligent life in the universe is due to the deadly effects of local...

Laser creates brightest light on Earth By Roger Highfield, Science Editor Last Updated: 3:01pm BST 08/04/2008 The brightest light on Earth now shines in a laboratory in Texas, one which will enable scientists to create a tabletop star. The $14m Texas Petawatt laser reached greater than one petawatt - one thousand million million watts - of laser power in the past few days, making it the highest powered laser in the world, says Prof Todd Ditmire, a physicist at The University of Texas at Austin. The laser in action in the lab, the blue glass amplifiers can also be seen...

WASHINGTON (AP) - A massive exploding faraway star—the brightest supernova astronomers have ever seen—has scientists wondering if a similar celestial fireworks show may light up the sky much closer to Earth sometime soon. The discovery, announced Monday by NASA, drew oohs and aahs for months from the handful of astronomers who peered through telescopes to see the fuzzy remnants of the spectacular explosion after it was first spotted last fall.

A star on the far side of our galaxy is 40 million times brighter, and 150 times more massive, than our Sun. Although the star appears to be the brightest yet detected, it cannot be seen with the unaided eye because it is shrouded in a huge gas and dust cloud. Astronomers at the University of Florida had to calculate its luminosity from its infrared radiation, which can penetrate the otherwise opaque cloud. Scientists say the size of LBV 1806-20 means it will live a very short life. Singular proof The Florida team says the superstar is at least as...