Revealing flares

摘要

Transient bursts of cosmic light provide a unique window on what's going on in the distant Universe. But similar bursts closer to home may be muddying the view, and hopes rest on a new tool to resolve things. Whenever we look at the Universe afresh, we are reminded of its inexhaustible richness. Although much of the sky seems immutable, scanning the heavens for change can teach us much about this richness and its underlying physics — observations of rare stellar explosions are increasingly the key to unlocking the Universes secrets. Writing in The Astrophysical Journal, Kulkarni and Rau draw attention to a complication in observing transient phenomena from the far Universe: if astronomers wish to follow such far-off bursts of light, they must first take a foreground 'fog' of flaring stars in our own Galaxy into account.