A bright γ-ray flare interpreted as a giant magnetar flare in NGC 253

Soft γ-ray repeaters exhibit bursting emission in hard X-rays and soft γ-rays. During the active phase, they emit random short (milliseconds to several seconds long), hard-X-ray bursts, with peak luminosities¹ of 10³⁶ to 10⁴³ erg per second. Occasionally, a giant flare with an energy of around 10⁴⁴ to 10⁴⁶ erg is emitted². These phenomena are thought to arise from neutron stars with extremely high magnetic fields (10¹⁴ to 10¹⁵ gauss), called magnetars^1,3,4. A portion of the second-long initial pulse of a giant flare in some respects mimics short γ-ray bursts^5,6, which have recently been identified as resulting from the merger of two neutron stars accompanied by gravitational-wave emission⁷. Two γ-ray bursts, GRB 051103 and GRB 070201, have been associated with giant flares^2,8-11. Here we report observations of the γ-ray burst GRB 200415A, which we localized to a 20-square-arcmin region of the starburst galaxy NGC 253, located about 3.5 million parsecs away. The burst had a sharp, millisecond-scale hard spectrum in the initial pulse, which was followed by steady fading and softening over 0.2 seconds. The energy released (roughly 1.3 × 10⁴⁶ erg) is similar to that of the superflare^5,12,13 from the Galactic soft γ-ray repeater SGR 1806-20 (roughly 2.3 × 10⁴⁶ erg). We argue that GRB 200415A is a giant flare from a magnetar in NGC 253.