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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday June 10 2020, @10:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the flashy-showing dept.

Galactic flash points to long-sought source for enigmatic radio bursts:

On 28 April, as Earth's rotation swept a Canadian radio telescope across the sky, it watched for mysterious milliseconds long flashes called fast radio bursts (FRBs). At 7:34 a.m. local time an enormous one appeared, but awkwardly, in the peripheral vision of the scope. "It was way off the edge of the telescope," says Paul Scholz, an astronomer at the University of Toronto and a member of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME). Because of its brightness, the team knew its source was nearby. All other FRBs seen so far have erupted in distant galaxies—too far and too fast to figure out what produced them.

The team had a hunch about this one. In previous days, orbiting telescopes had witnessed a Milky Way magnetar—a neutron star with a powerful magnetic field—flinging out bursts of x-rays and gamma rays. The turmoil suggested it might be pulsing with radio waves, too. After some extra data processing, the team determined the FRB was "definitely colocated" with the magnetar, Scholz says. "We were really excited."

The find, announced in a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server on 20 May, could be the missing link in a problem that has puzzled astronomers for more than a decade. It's only a single event and many questions remain, including why this burst was 30 times less energetic than the weakest FRB traced to another galaxy. Yet astronomers are increasingly confident that some, if not all, of these laserlike radio flashes originate from magnetars, collapsed stars with magnetic fields 100 million times stronger than any magnet made on Earth. A magnetar origin would rule out more exotic sources such as supermassive black holes and merging neutron stars. "The game of alternative theories is becoming more and more difficult," says theorist Maxim Lyutikov of Purdue University. "For the majority, it's a decided question: It's magnetars."

The first FRB was detected in 2007, and astronomers have tallied a little over 100 since then. Their brevity makes them hard to study or trace to a particular celestial object. But several FRBs have been found to repeat, giving astronomers a chance to identify their host galaxy. And in the past year or two, wide-field telescopes such as CHIME, designed to survey large swaths of the sky, have begun to boost the number of detections substantially.

More: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.06223 [PDF]


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  • (Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Thursday June 11 2020, @12:03AM (2 children)

    by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 11 2020, @12:03AM (#1006067) Journal

    gravitational Lens, A flash that would light up an entire cluster, Ansel Adama at it again I guess.

    --
    В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by fishybell on Thursday June 11 2020, @01:37AM (1 child)

    by fishybell (3156) on Thursday June 11 2020, @01:37AM (#1006112)

    Considering that many FRBs repeat, some predictably, some not, this could actually be a novel way to detect exoplanets. Assuming any amount of the radiation is reflected, it would be theoretically possible to detect the reflected radiation. Obviously, the instruments would have to be hyper-sensitive but we'd be able to predict them and train our instruments in a very narrow region of space.

    • (Score: 2) by Muad'Dave on Thursday June 11 2020, @11:56AM

      by Muad'Dave (1413) on Thursday June 11 2020, @11:56AM (#1006242)

      Exoplanets yes. Habitable exoplanets, probably not unless the beings have an amazing resistance to huge gamma ray flux.