Our universe is not as peaceful as what we see in the night sky. Eruptions or catastrophes can happen anywhere at any second. This time, astronomers may have detected a giant gamma-ray flare from a nearby magnetar. A magnetar is a rapidly spinning type of neutron star, which is the remains of a star that died in a powerful explosion called a supernova. Magnetars are the strongest magnets in our universe. Their magnetic fields are about 10 trillion times more powerful than a refrigerator magnet or 100 trillion times more powerful than Earth’s magnetic field. “Our sun is a very ordinary star. When it dies, it will get bigger and become a red giant star. After that it will collapse into a small compact star called a white dwarf,” Soebur Razzaque, an astroparticle physicist at the University of Johannesburg, said in a statement. “But stars that are a lot more …