Bursts of radio waves in space can come from the nuclei of …

Astronomers have seen a handful of extremely intense and short radio waves since 2007, but they have yet to determine exactly what creates them. The explosions have sparked all sorts of speculations about their origins, from exploding or colliding stars to alien civilizations.

Now the speculation may soon be resolved and three teams of scientists are finally finding a clear and plausible source for the cryptic pulses known as “rapid bursts” or FRBs. Using different telescopes, teams in the United States, Canada and China independently examined an FRB 30,000 light years away and lasted only a millisecond from April onwards, and all three came to the same conclusion: it probably came from a magnetar in our galaxy.

A magnetar is the rotating core of a massive dead star with a strong magnetic field. According to Christopher Bochenek, Caltech astronomer and lead author of the US-based research, magnetars are so dense that a teaspoon would weigh one to 1,000 pyramids in Giza. The researchers published their findings Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“This discovery makes it plausible that most of the fast radio bursts come from magnetars,” Bochenek said. The radio burst they were studying was a thousand times stronger than anything else in the Milky Way, he said.

So far, astronomers have struggled to explain why some FRBs aren’t one-off events like supernova explosions, but instead seem to repeat themselves. The magnetars could provide the answer as they slowly spin and flicker regularly, like a lighthouse. They are abundant both inside and outside our galaxy to be the source of other outbreaks that scientists have seen.

Bochenek and his team studied the FRB using a network of small radio antennas called STARE2, deployed in California and Utah, to identify the locations of the explosions and differentiate them from radio signals generated by humans on Earth. Canadian astronomers using the massive CHIME telescope in British Columbia have also attributed the FRB to a magnetar, and a Chinese collaboration has had results consistent with their radio telescope.

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