A radio discharge from the Milky Way may help solve the …

Astrophysicists first discovered an explosion of cosmic radio waves in our solar system and identified its source. This emerges from a study published on Wednesday that sheds new light on one of the secrets of the universe.

The origin of powerful high-speed radio bursts (FRBs) – intense bursts of radio emission that last only a few milliseconds – have puzzled scientists since they were first discovered just over a decade ago.

They are usually extragalactic, which means they originate outside of our galaxy. On April 28 of this year, several telescopes discovered a bright FRB from the same area in our Milky Way.

It was also important that they could determine the source: Galactic Magnetar SGR 1935 + 2154.

Young magnetar neutron stars, which are the most magnetic objects in the universe, have long been prime suspects in the search for the source of these radio waves.

However, this discovery marks the first time astronomers have plotted the signal directly on a magnetar.

Christopher Bochenek, whose US Transient Astronomical Radio Emissions Survey 2 (STARE2) was one of the teams that discovered the outbreak, said the magnetar emitted as much energy in about a millisecond of the sun’s radio waves in 30 seconds.

He said the burst was “so bright” that theoretically, if you had a record of the raw data from your cell phone’s 4G LTE receiver and knew what to look for, “you might have found this signal about halfway through the galaxy” phone data.

That energy is comparable to FRBs from outside the galaxy, he said, reinforcing the idea that magnetars are the source of most extragalactic explosions.

Up to 10,000 FRBs can occur each day, but these high-energy spikes weren’t discovered until 2007.

They have been hotly debated ever since, and even small steps to identify their origins are causing great excitement among astronomers.

One problem is that current lightning strikes are difficult to locate without knowing where to look.

Theories about their origins ranged from catastrophic events such as supernovae to neutron stars, which are fragments of super dense stars formed after a star’s gravitational collapse.

There are even more exotic explanations – excluded by astronomers – for extraterrestrial signals.

Read also: A scan of 10.3 million stars still shows no signs of aliens

“Key puzzle”

The latest discovery published in three articles in the journal natureit was made by combining observations from space and ground-based telescopes.

Both STARE2 and the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) discovered the flashlight and traced it to the magnetar.

Later that day, this region of the sky came within sight of the extremely sensitive five-hundred-aperture spherical telescope (FAST) in China.

Astronomers were already observing the magnetar, which had entered an “active phase” and fired bursts of X-rays and gamma rays, according to Bing Zhang, a researcher at the University of Nevada and part of the team that reported on the discovery.

FAST didn’t detect the FRB itself, but more X-rays were detected by the magnetar, he said at a news conference, raising new questions about why only one of the bursts were associated with an FRB.

In one nature Commentary Amanda Weltman and Anthony Walters from the high-energy physics, cosmology and astrophysics group at the University of Cape Town said connecting the FRB to a magnetar “could solve a key puzzle.”

However, they said the findings also raise a number of new questions, including which mechanism “would produce such bright but rare radio bursts with X-ray counterparts.”

“A promising possibility is that a flare from a magnetar collides with the surrounding medium, creating a shock wave,” they wrote, adding that the results underscore the need for international collaboration in astronomy and monitoring of various types. of signals.