Astrophysicists have uncovered a new explanation for the brightest explosions in the universe. Joseph Farah and his team at the University of California, Santa Barbara, discovered that magnetars powered by frame-dragging effects can explain the strange flickering patterns seen in Type I superluminous supernovae.

For years, scientists struggled to explain why these supernovae's light curves showed bumps and wiggles rather than smooth fading. The breakthrough came when astronomers observed SN 2024afav, which exhibited a chirping pattern where the timing between brightness fluctuations decreased by about 35 percent. This allowed researchers to predict subsequent bumps with remarkable accuracy.

The solution involves a newborn magnetar dragging spacetime around it like a spinning bowling ball in molasses. A misaligned accretion disk around the magnetar wobbles due to the Lense-Thirring effect, periodically blocking and redirecting the star's intense radiation. As the disk shrinks from falling matter, the wobbles speed up, creating the characteristic chirping signal.