Tomoshi Takeda

The Crab Nebula flickers with X-ray flashes thirty times per second. That's the beat of a pulsar — a dead star that spins and sends us pulses like a lighthouse. Japan's NinjaSat, a satellite the size of a shoebox, caught these flashes to figure out where it was.

In April 2023, Japanese satellites detected a super-intense X-ray burst on the neutron star MAXI J1752–457. The star cooled down in 4 days — five times faster than usual. Like someone cracked open a cosmic window.