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Researchers in the United States, Canada and China independently came to this conclusion.
This is an Inside Science story.
Astronomers have spotted a handful of extremely intense and short bursts of radio waves since 2007, but they have yet to define exactly what is creating them. The explosions have fueled all sorts of speculation about their origins, from exploding or colliding stars to alien civilizations.
Now the speculation may soon be resolved, with three teams of scientists finally finding a clear and plausible source for the enigmatic pulses, known as “fast radio bursts” or FRBs. Using different telescopes, teams in the United States, Canada and China independently studied an April FRB that originated 30,000 light-years away and lasted only a millisecond, and all three came to the same conclusion: it probably had originated from a magnetar in our galaxy.
A magnetar is the rotating core of a huge dead star with a powerful magnetic field. The magnetars are so dense that a teaspoon of one would weigh up to 1,000 pyramids of Giza, according to Christopher Bochenek, a Caltech astronomer and lead author of the US-based research. 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 blast they examined was thousands of times stronger than anything else in the Milky Way, he said.
Until now, astronomers have struggled to explain why some FRBs aren’t one-off events like supernova explosions, but instead seem to repeat themselves. The magnetars may provide the answer, as they rotate slowly and periodically flash, like a beacon. They are also abundant enough both inside and outside our galaxy to be the source of other explosions that scientists have seen.
Bochenek and his team spotted the FRB with a network of small radio antennas known as STARE2, which is spread across California and Utah to help identify the locations of the explosions and distinguish them from radio signals produced by people on Earth. Similarly, Canadian astronomers using the massive CHIME telescope in British Columbia have attributed the FRB to a magnetar, and a Chinese collaboration had results consistent with their own radio telescope.
Inside Science is an editorial independent paper, electronic and video journalism news service owned and operated by the American Institute of Physics.
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