I. H. Stairs

At night, while most people sleep, the giant dish of the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia keeps listening to the sky. Over 24,186 hours, that's nearly three years of continuous observation, it caught 50 pulsars and three fast radio bursts.

After a supernova explosion, a neutron star neutron star remains: a city-sized ball of unimaginably dense matter, spinning hundreds of times per second. Any tiny bump on its surface would make it wobble like an off-balance spinning top, humming faintly through the fabric of space.

Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars that emit radio pulses like a lighthouse. But some of them stay silent almost all the time, occasionally emitting a single pulse. Such objects are called rotating radio transients (RRATs). They were discovered nearly twenty years ago, but they remain a mystery.