Astronomers have discovered a supercharged space laser shooting at Earth from halfway across the universe. The cosmic energy beam, which was partially revealed to us via a weird space-time trick first predicted by Einstein, is the brightest and most distant of its kind ever seen.
The natural laser, called a "hydroxyl megamaser" is essentially a giant beam of electromagnetic radiation emitted when a pair of galaxies violently merge. During these cosmic collisions, giant clouds of gas are compressed, exciting large reservoirs of hydroxyl (OH) molecules that release high-energy microwaves.
