A newfound type of rotating stars played peek-a-boo with astronomers, appearing and disappearing a few times each day. The stars seem to act like faulty cosmic lighthouses, spinning and emitting brief and bright flashes of radio waves that are among the brightest objects in the sky, then disappearing from the heavens entirely. The discovery is detailed in the Feb. 16 issue of the journal Nature. An international team of researchers spotted the new stars, called rotating radio transients, or RRATs, using the Parkes radio telescope in Australia. They were searching for radio pulsars—rotating neutron stars emitting radiation—at the time, but...