ASKAP J1935+2148

MeerKAT is an amazing array of 64 radio telescopes in South Africa. Astronomers want to expand this to the Square Kilometer Array, which will actually consist of thousands of telescopes in South Africa and Australia. But it’s already seeing great stuff. For example, this June they found a weird thing that flashes like a pulsar, but extremely slowly: roughly once an hour, instead of many times a second like an ordinary pulsar!

That’s insane! What is this thing? We don’t know, and that’s...