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RandomFactor [soylentnews.org] 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 [space.com].

This FRB is different. Telescope observations suggest that the burst came from a known neutron star [livescience.com] — 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 [livescience.com], 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 [esa.int]. "This is the first ever observational connection between magnetars and fast radio bursts."

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.

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 [doi.org])

Original Submission