It comes from inside the Milky Way

From Popular Mechanics

Since 2007, astronomers have competed to solve an incredible cosmic mystery: What is causing those sudden bursts of radiation – known as fast radio bursts (FRBs) – to bounce across the universe? Over the past decade, scientists have observed hundreds of these impulses, but have struggled for a long time to pinpoint their origin.

Now, we can finally have a definitive answer: magnetars.

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This bizarre type of neutron star sounds like something that could leap off the pages of a comic, but astronomers believe they could be the culprits of the fast radio bursts.

Neutron stars form after ridiculously massive stars, much larger than our sun, die. Magnetars take this already absurd process to the extreme. Starry peels generate enormous amounts of energy and have an extremely powerful magnetic field that is about a trillion times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field. (Hence the menacing name.)

Last April, scientists from two separate observatories in North America observed a pulse of high-energy radio waves emanating from a magnetar inside the Milky Way, just 30,000 light-years from Earth. In the days before scientists observed FRBs, the magnetar, named SGR 1935 + 2154, had become extremely active by firing X-rays and gamma rays across the galaxy.

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The researchers, who are part of the teams of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) and the Survey for Transient Astronomical Radio Emission 2 (STARE2), describe their findings in a trio of articles published in the journal Nature. This FRB, in particular, has been the weakest FRB we have seen to date. And a major observatory – China’s five-hundred-meter-aperture spherical radio telescope (FAST) – has ignored it altogether, so there are still unanswered questions.

However, this discovery could mark a huge leap forward in the study of FRBs for astronomers. Most FRBs are fleeting and only appear for milliseconds. Some occur repeatedly, while scientists have only observed others once. Many of the FRBs we’ve seen originate in galaxies millions of light-years away, so it’s hard to identify what’s causing them. The fact that this FRB event originated in our cosmic courtyard is a big deal.

Astronomers have discovered many magnetars in our galaxy. Now that one of them has been linked to these mysterious fast radio bursts, it should be easier to justify monitoring the others in more detail. Magnetars have been on the scientists’ candidate list for a while, but this new discovery could help us unravel the mysterious case once and for all.

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