Weiwei Zhu

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.

In the dense family of old stars that astronomers call the cluster NGC 6791, a lonely radio beacon has been spotted — the pulsar PSR J1922+3745. Such objects are born when a massive star explodes and its core collapses into a tiny sphere the size of a city, which spins and emits radio waves like a rotating lighthouse beam.