Sarah Buchner

A solar flare is like thunder on a clear day: a short but powerful burst of energy. The MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa caught one such M1.3-class flare and examined it with unprecedented clarity. Ordinary instruments see either bright details or faint ones, but not both at once.

Imagine two neutron stars, compressed to the size of a metropolis yet weighing one and a half Suns each. They whirl in an unrestrained gravitational dance, drawing together and flying apart every 4.4 hours. At periastron — the point of closest approach — only a couple of light-seconds separate them, and their speed reaches three and a half million kilometers per hour.