I had a teacher at school who was pretty odd. He was tiny… if he was an inch above five feet, even in his elevator shoes, that would be a surprise. He was almost as broad as he was tall, and enormously powerful - I'd have bet on him to win an arm-wrestling match with Mike Tyson, three straight. His hair was…there's no other word for it…orange. He had enormously bushy orange eyebrows, and wore a walrus mustache so massive that you wouldn't have been surprised to be told he'd torn it off a rhinocerous he'd knocked unconscious in mid-charge.

He taught physics…at least that was what he was meant to be teaching. Really, what he liked to talk about in class was religion. I can't tell you he was normal in this department, either. I won't describe what he believed, for fear there might still be people on the planet who believe the same sort of thing, and who would think I was making fun of them. They'd be right. All I'm prepared to say is that I think even God Him, or Her-self would have giggled. But the oddest thing about him was that he didn't like to admit that the universe, the stars, the moon, the solar system… the whole durned space shooting match, in fact… existed beyond being pricks in Heaven's ceiling, revealing the White-Hot Power beyond. For him, there was only the earth, sitting surrounded by Heaven.

The fact that one could see the sun and the moon and stars as objects in the sky at night, and that they moved, and that they waxed and waned and had eclipses and things was obviously awkward for him, and so he had devised a crude, but effective way of dealing with it… at least where schoolboys were concerned. At the first sign of any un-called for outbreak of logic in his classroom, he would say, pugnaciously, that really, there weren't more than a hundred stars in the sky. We fell for it every time, and quickly dissolved into disarray, tripping over each other with outraged protests and half-formed arguments, until he had to call us to order and remind us that we were there to study physics, not speculate about the nature of the Heavens.

(Ha!) At that age, I suppose, we hadn't yet heard of such things as diversionary actions and opening second fronts. The call to order was spectacular. He dropped his voice down into some impossibly low register and said N-o-ww, Bo-o-oys. It wasn't very loud, but it vibrated in such a singular way that it cut into your consciousness like a hot knife into butter. He was pretty close to retirement age when I took his class 50 years ago, so it is most unlikely that he is still alive. I can't remember his name, but at least in part, I owe him my enthusiasm for space and matters stellar, because I have been half-consciously disproving his 100-stars assertion over and over again in my head for the last half a century.

It occurs to me how astonishingly the universe has grown in size and complexity in the public's consciousness during that time. From arguing about whether there were a hundred stars in the night sky or perhaps a thousand, we are now accepting without quibble that our star, the sun, is just one among billions, and that many of those billions have multiple planets of their own. I say in public consciousness. One of the funny things about humans is that we can know things without knowing them. More than 400 years ago, Giordano Bruno, an Italian monk, wrote that "In space there are numberless earths circling around other suns, which may bear upon them creatures similar or even superior to those upon our human Earth." Poor man was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600 for saying that.

But the point is this: if he was able to figure that out in the year 15 something, why did it take the rest of us an extra 400 years? In early September in 1859, telegraph wires suddenly shorted out in the United States and Europe, igniting widespread fires. The colourful display we know as the Northern Lights, normally visible only in polar regions, were seen as far south as Rome and Hawaii. Hawaii's on the same sort of latitude as the northern tip of the Dominican Republic, so we're talking well south of Bermuda.

It was, indeed, one of those solar flares we've been having in the last few days, although the event 144 years ago was three times more powerful than the strongest space storm in modern memory. That was - if you don't know - the one that cut power to the entire province of Quebec in 1989. Yet last week, when stories of these solar storms were being carried in the media, it was as if we were hearing about the phenomenon for the first time. In August of 1998, there was an explosion on the sun as powerful as a hundred million hydrogen bombs. Earth-orbiting satellites registered a surge of x-rays, and minutes later they were pelted by fast-moving solar protons. Ham radio operators experienced a strong shortwave blackout. Our planet's magnetic field reeled from the onslaught. Yet that event didn't make any headlines at all.

The explosion was an "X-class" solar flare, and during years around solar maximum, such as 1998, such flares are commonplace… they happen every few days. A few days later - no surprise - another blast wave swept past Earth. Satellites registered a surge of x-rays and gamma-rays. Hams experienced another blackout. It seemed like another X-class solar flare. Except for one thing: this flare didn't come from the sun. It came from outer space.

The source of the blast was SGR 1900+14 - a neutron star about 45,000 light years away, according to NASA astronomers. It was the strongest burst of cosmic x-rays and gamma rays ever recorded on the earth. SGR 1900+14 is a type of neutron star called a magnetar. Magnetars have the strongest magnetic fields in the universe: a million billion gauss, according to NASA. For comparison, the magnetic field of the sun is less than 10 gauss in most places, and about 1000 gauss near sunspots. That million billion thing is a pretty serious number.

In the event, no great harm was done. Nonetheless, it made a deep impression on astronomers. From halfway across the galaxy, SGR 1900+14 had touched the earth. Now, they realise that it happens much more often than most people know. Since 1998, Earth has experienced about ten similar events, five of them from SGR 1900+14, and the rest from, probably, other magnetars. NASA believes there are many more of them.

They've set up a little space programme for trying to find them. They're using what they call the Interplanetary Network - a flotilla of spacecraft scattered around the solar system. The spaceships in the flotilla include Ulysses, the 2001 Mars Odyssey, RHESSI and others. None of these missions is dedicated to magnetar research, but each one carries a gamma-ray or x-ray detector - usually for some unrelated purpose. The detector on 2001 Mars Odyssey, for example, is used to look for subsurface ice on Mars. When a wave of radiation sweeps through the solar system, it hits the different spacecraft in the Interplanetary Network at slightly different times.

Astronomers figure out where the burst came from by comparing arrival times. "It's simple triangulation," says astronomer Kevin Hurley of the University of California at Berkeley, who is the man leading the effort. "The Ulysses spacecraft is particularly important because of its long looping orbit around the Sun. Ulysses' great distance from the other spacecraft makes the triangulation precise." None of this is a secret. We've been told. We know these things… yet we don't know them. I have a feeling that what goes on off the earth is going to remain abstract, until it's fixed in people's minds by human experience. Meantime, sounds are a great mnemonic, and it may be that when we understand that the universe is as full of sound as the earth is, our imaginations might be a little better captured by the idea of knowing about space.

Late last year, I read, and then wrote in this column, as I remember, about sound-recording devices aboard NASA's Voyager probe as it nipped past Saturn, Uranus and Neptune on its way into deep space, and the noises that it recorded. They were described as being like "a mixture of whistles, chirrups, howls, static and something that sounds like chattering voices." A month ago, I came across a story that said astronomers, for the first time, had detected sound waves emanating from a supermassive black hole in space.

With a frequency of ten million years, these astronomers said, the wave was the deepest "note" ever found in the universe a B-flat that is 57 octaves below a piano's middle C! Then, a kind of mother lode. Last week, I found a story in the New Scientist about a physicist who had recreated the sound of the Big Bang. The story is at:

www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994320

There's a link to allow you to listen to a recording of this scientist's recreation of the noise the universe made in the throes of its creation. It's a stunning experience, I promise you. The uncomfortable thing for me is that it sounds exactly like my old physics master, he of the elevator shoes and orange mustache, saying, N-o-ww, Bo-o-oys. I can't help feeling he's trying to take my eye off yet another weak link in his vision of the universe. And I'm falling for it, yet again.

gshorto@ibl.bm