Pei Wang

Fast radio bursts are millisecond-long cosmic signals. Previously, searching for them was like blindly tuning a radio dial. The EDEN neural network sees the entire frequency spread and recognizes the burst pattern like a musician reads notes. On source FRB 20121102A, it found 5,927 bursts — three times more than before.

A spinning top that whirls so fast it completes 220 rotations in a single second: that's exactly what China's FAST radio telescope has caught. This is the pulsar PSR J1810-0623, a neutron star the size of a city but with more mass than the Sun.

A chef pours hot sugar syrup onto a cold table, and it sets into crystals. That's roughly how engineers pictured metal solidification: the liquid instantly becomes a scatter of crystalline grains. But close-up imaging revealed an extra stage wedged between liquid and solid.

Since their discovery in 2007, fast radio bursts (FRBs) have teased astrophysicists with their elusive nature. These millisecond signals arrive from distant galaxies and carry colossal energy: for an instant, they radiate as much as the Sun does in a month.

A cosmic object spins, but its shadow isn't round. Astrophysicists examined a black hole in an unusual version of gravity — the so-called brane world (where our universe is a three-dimensional surface in a space of higher dimensions).

Two spinning tops whirl so close they nearly touch. One is scorching blue, the other dim white. Together they complete a full orbit in twenty hours. This is the pair Feige 64: a blue star with a mass of just a third of the Sun's, and a white dwarf, the cooled core of a former star, one and a half times heavier than our Sun. The blue star seems too hot for its mass.

The orchestra plays without a conductor. Each instrument follows its own schedule: the violin on Monday, the flute on Wednesday, the timpani on Saturday. Astronomers hear not music but isolated notes scattered across the calendar. A telescope sees a star only when it is above the horizon and when the schedule has allotted time for it.