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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: 2) by Kitsune008 on Thursday June 11 2020, @12:08AM (3 children)

    by Kitsune008 (9054) on Thursday June 11 2020, @12:08AM (#1006069)

    Yes, and thank [insert favourite entity here] there were no goatse images included, as no black holes were detected.

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by fishybell on Thursday June 11 2020, @01:25AM (2 children)

    by fishybell (3156) on Thursday June 11 2020, @01:25AM (#1006104)

    Based on the source material [thank.god] feel like this is a question of white holes [wikipedia.org] being there or not.

    • (Score: 2) by Kitsune008 on Thursday June 11 2020, @02:24AM (1 child)

      by Kitsune008 (9054) on Thursday June 11 2020, @02:24AM (#1006129)

      Well, while I find that an interesting hypothesis, to my way of thinking the debate of black vs white holes is pointless. It's like debating positive vs negative in a DC debate.
      Obviously, a white hole is at the other end of a black hole. Big Bang at White Hole!

      What I found far more interesting was your 'source' link.
      I clicked on the link, and as I waited for the page to load, I lit a bowl of Razzberry Cough, page still loading, I'm still smoking.
      Page still not loaded, load a bowl of Granddaddy Purps, lit it, page still loading, I'm loaded, what is this website?

      LOL! I don't know your source, but the search was a trip!

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @06:19AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @06:19AM (#1006193)

        If you haven't yet, try an herb vaporizer. I've been using an Arizer for ~1.5 years now, and it really pays for itself. An 1/8th will last me a week with multiple daily sessions.