Scientific American 202601 Flashes in the Night Summary
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What this article is really about
This article is about a change in how astronomers see the universe.
For a long time, space was often described as majestic but slow. Galaxies evolved over billions of years, stars lived and died over immense stretches of time, and most cosmic change seemed far removed from ordinary human experience. Ann Finkbeiner argues that this picture is now incomplete. Modern surveys are revealing a universe full of sudden, violent, short-lived events called transients: flashes that can appear without warning, blaze with absurd amounts of energy, and then fade on timescales of seconds, days or months.
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