Mysterious 'fast radio burst' traced to a known object in the Milky Way for the first time ever
By Brandon Specktor - Senior Writer 17 hours ago
The blast was the 'most powerful radio burst' the Milky Way has ever seen, and could solve a decade-old mystery.
An illustration of a magnetar -- the highly magnetized corpse of a collapsed star -- bursting with energy. Scientists think they could be responsible for fast radio bursts (FRB)
(Image: © McGill University Graphic Design Team)
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are some of the most energetic — and most brief — blasts of light in the universe.
These mysterious radio wave pulses flash through space a thousand times a day, occasionally brushing past Earth and its vigilant telescopes. FRBs appear and disappear in milliseconds, yet pack more energy than the sun unleashes in three days. Some FRBs repeat over days or months. Most travel hundreds of millions of light-years to reach Earth. And none have ever led back to a definitive source in the cosmos — until now.
In a series of three papers published today (Nov. 4) in the journal Nature, researchers from the United States and Canada report the detection of an FRB that originates not in some far-flung galaxy, but 30,000 light-years away in the northern sky of the Milky Way. Not only is this the first FRB ever detected within our own galaxy, but also the first to originate from a known object in the universe — in this case, a highly-magnetized stellar corpse known as a magnetar.
This burnt-out star — named SGR 1935+2154 — provides the first concrete evidence of the origins of FRBs after more than a decade of mystery, Daniele Michilli, a co-author of one of the new studies, told Live Science.
"This is the most powerful radio burst ever detected in our galaxy, which is exciting on its own," Michilli, an astrophysicist with the FRB-hunting Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), said in an email. "But now we finally have evidence of at least one object that can produce FRBs. Magnetars were already one of the main candidates, so it is a nice confirmation of our theories."
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