“Ghost Objects of the Cosmos” –Burst Into Existence Then Disappear a Decades-Long Afterglow


“We thought, ‘That was weird,'” said Casey Law, assistant research astronomer in the Department of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. “Its peak brightness in the 90’s was quite high, so it was a big, big change: about a factor of 50 decrease in brightness. We basically went through every radio survey, every radio data-set we could find, every archive in the world to piece together the story of what happened to this thing.”