UNAWE Space Scoop - A Mysterious Notification From a Dying Massive Star

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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