In January 2025, astronomers woke up to an alert of a mysterious event that occurred 2.8 billion light years away from Earth. As such things go, this was fairly close to Earth and was an opportunity for detailed observation of the event’s evolution. It was a powerful burst of X-rays, known as a fast X-ray transient or FXT. This burst was named ‘EP 250108a’, after the Einstein Probe, that’s the EP part, that detected the event.
Let’s call it 108a. Just between us…
FXTs are generally hard to detect and occur far from the Earth. They only last between a few seconds to a few hours, so the astronomers who discovered 108a got really excited when the alert came, uh, knocking on their door. Soon, a large international team of researchers assembled to study the of these mysterious bursts.
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