This week we'll be looking over two papers from last week's Nature describing the discovery of odd optical/IR/X-ray flaring from some kind of Galactic object. The speculation is that this is a new type of magnetar (extremely highly magnetized neutron star, with a surface magnetic field of order 10^14 Gauss). The other two types manifest themselves as either soft gamma-ray repeaters (SGRs) or anomalous X-ray pulsars (AXPs) with periods of a few seconds.
The papers are by Stefanescu et al. 2008, Nature, 455, 503: stefanescu08.pdf and Castro-Tirado et al., 2008, Nature, 455, 506: castro08.pdf. There is also a commentary in News and Views by Chryssa Kouveliotou: kouveliotou08.pdf.
The non-P*w*rp**nt slides are here (in pdf): rapidflares.pdf