On 27 December 2004, gamma- and x-ray detectors aboard seven spacecraft were momentarily saturated by a 0.2-second gamma-ray pulse of unprecedented intensity. Another dozen orbiters detected the pulse with particle detectors activated by the sudden flood of high-energy photons. It was, in fact, the brightest transient event ever recorded by astronomical instruments. Appearing in the 28 April 2005 issue of Nature, the first five published papers 1–5 on the giant flare make a strong case that its cause was a global rearrangement of the crust and magnetosphere of a neutron star, on the far side of the galaxy, whose magnetic field is a thousand times stronger than that of the more pedestrian neutron stars we know as radio pulsars.
In 1992, theorists Robert Duncan (University of Texas) and Christopher Thompson (University of Toronto) proposed the existence of such hyper-magnetized neutron stars, called them “magnetars,” and offered a scenario for...
