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Closest Fast Radio Burst to Earth Yet

posted by martyb on Monday August 10 2020, @09:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the zeroing-in dept.

RandomFactor writes:

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are extremely short bursts of high energy radiation and typically originate hundreds of millions of light-years away. Now one has been detected for the first time from inside the milky way from a magnetar.

This FRB is different. Telescope observations suggest that the burst came from a known neutron star — the fast-spinning, compact core of a dead star, which packs a sun's-worth of mass into a city-sized ball — about 30,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Vulpecula. The stellar remnant fits into an even stranger class of star called a magnetar, named for its incredibly powerful magnetic field, which is capable of spitting out intense amounts of energy long after the star itself has died. It now seems that magnetars are almost certainly the source of at least some of the universe's many mysterious FRBs, the study authors wrote.

"We've never seen a burst of radio waves, resembling a fast radio burst, from a magnetar before," lead study author Sandro Mereghetti, of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Milan, Italy, said in a statement. "This is the first ever observational connection between magnetars and fast radio bursts."

Journal Reference:
INTEGRAL Discovery of a Burst with Associated Radio Emission from the Magnetar SGR 1935+2154 - IOPscience, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/aba2cf)

Radio emissions drop off with the square of distance, and by the time they reach the Earth the high energy emissions of FRBs have been described as similar in magnitude to 'a cell phone calling from the Moon.' This burst originated several orders of magnitude closer than is typical and was detected by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Integral satellite, as well as radio telescopes in British Columbia, Canada, California and Utah.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by inertnet on Monday August 10 2020, @11:08AM (3 children)

    by inertnet (4071) on Monday August 10 2020, @11:08AM (#1034278) Journal

    This may be a silly question, but does a magnetar vacuum up all the iron from its neighborhood? If so, how big a neighborhood? From all directions or just an imaginary disk?

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Monday August 10 2020, @06:21PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 10 2020, @06:21PM (#1034440) Journal
    FWIW, I believe it's assumed that such neutron stars form from normal giant stars at the end of their lifespan. The cores of such stars would have a lot of iron and nickel. Given how much energy is radiated by a magnetar, I don't know if they would vacuum anything up after the initial supernova formation.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by stormwyrm on Tuesday August 11 2020, @06:20AM (1 child)

    by stormwyrm (717) on Tuesday August 11 2020, @06:20AM (#1034773) Journal
    The magnetic fields of magnetars are in the gigatesla range. Yes, 108 to 1011 T. In contrast we can barely manage a pulsed field in the kilotesla range on earth, and the strongest steady magnetic fields we can make are only around 100 T. At a distance of about half that from earth to the moon, a magnetar's field would be enough to erase magnetic storage media like hard drives. At 1000 km distance, the magnetic field would be so powerful that it can interfere with many chemical reactions, including those needed to sustain earth life. As to how far it would attract a piece of iron that has to be magnetised to a dipole first, well, that's an inverse seventh power, so it's likely not all that far; the force probably becomes appreciable only at distances of maybe tens of thousands of kilometres from the surface of the magnetar. The equations for magnetic force are rather complex to say the least so it's a bit hard to work out.
    --
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