Having launched on January 9, 2024 by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Einstein Probe detected several new events during its commissioning phase. Last October, Yuan Weimin, the spacecraft's principle investigator, told China Central Television that the X-ray observatory had already discovered around 60 very strong transient celestial objects, close to a thousand potential transients, and nearly 500 stellar flares, along with a gamma-ray burst from the very early universe.
One of those detections was EP240408a, an unusual blast that lit up discussions between astronomers. Zhang and his colleagues immediately utilized the spacecraft's second instrument, the Follow-up X-ray Telescope, to take observations of the new source 1.8 days after it was first spotted by its companion, the Wide-field X-ray Telescope.
