Shuang-Xi Yi

In October 2022, the space-based detector GECAM-C caught the most powerful gamma-ray burst ever seen, GRB 221009A — an explosion that briefly became the brightest source of gamma rays in the sky. But the most interesting part came after: the instrument detected a series of additional flares, and one of them was record-breaking.

Light fades like a campfire when you stop adding wood. Gamma-ray bursts, the brightest explosions in the Universe, have their own rhythm of fading. Astronomers took 85 such bursts caught by the Swift satellite and looked at how fast their brightness drops. Inside a burst hides a black hole that greedily sucks in matter.

An avalanche in a sandpile starts with a single grain. No one knows exactly where it will slip or how big the slide will be. But if you keep pouring sand, the pile itself reaches a state where avalanches of all sizes, from tiny trickles to massive collapses, follow the same law.

A translator at a meeting keeps getting distracted by every rustle in the room, then suddenly dives into a long monologue by the speaker. That's exactly how the fast radio burst source FRB 20240114A behaves: in one hour, its pulses fire randomly, but over months they line up into a predictable drift.