Ziteng Wang

Two vortex rings launched one after the other pass through each other and swap places. This dance, first seen in the 19th century with smoke rings, has now been reproduced on a quantum processor. Vortices are the actors on a quantum stage where time plays the role of an extra dimension.

Astronomers caught a signal from a cosmic lighthouse — a radio pulsar with a period of 36 minutes. Unlike ordinary pulsars (neutron stars that spin hundreds of times per second), this one barely turned. It transmitted pulses for only eight days and vanished, visible only in the radio range.

In 2022, astronomers began discovering strange cosmic beacons — long-period radio transients. Unlike fast pulsars, discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967, these objects flared with periods of tens of minutes and hours.

For almost twenty years, FRB (fast radio bursts) have intrigued astrophysicists — millisecond shrieks from the depths of space, carrying the energy of millions of Suns.

In 2007, astronomers heard a mysterious millisecond click from space — that's how fast radio bursts, or FRBs, were discovered. Since then, they've become a cosmic-scale detective story: as bright as an entire galaxy and compressed into an instant, these signals race through the Universe at the speed of light.