Anatoly Spitkovsky

Two neutron stars — these are ultra-dense remnants of dead stars, each the size of a city but heavier than the Sun. Their existence was predicted back in 1934 by Fritz Zwicky. A teaspoon of this matter weighs billions of tons. When two such objects draw close before merging, their magnetic fields twist and snap like taut strings.

Even Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who first detected the strict periodicity of radio signals, noticed that some pulses would suddenly vanish. Today we know: variability is not a whim, but the voice of intricate electrodynamics.