For the first time ever, astronomers have detected a burst of radio waves from within our own galaxy — and traced the powerful signal to a young neutron star known as a magnetar, according to a report.
Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, which last only a few milliseconds, have confounded scientists since they were first discovered 13 years ago, Agence France-Presse reported.
They typically originate outside the Milky Way, but on April 28, several telescopes detected a bright FRB from the same area inside our galaxy, according to new research that sheds light on the mystery.
Astrophysicists determined that the cosmic blast originated from galactic magnetar SGR 1935+2154.
Magnetars — neutron stars believed to have extremely powerful magnetic fields — have long been prime suspects in the hunt for the source of the mysterious radio bursts.
Christopher Bochenek, whose Survey for Transient Astronomical Radio Emission 2 in the US was one of the teams to spot the radio burst, said that in about a millisecond the magnetar emitted as much energy as the Sun’s radio waves do in 30 seconds, AFP reported.
The burst was “so bright,” he said, that theoretically, if you had a recording of the raw data from your cell phone’s 4G LTE receiver and knew what to search for, “you might have found this signal that came about halfway across the galaxy” in the device’s data.
As many as 10,000 FRBs may occur each day, but the high-energy blasts were only discovered in 2007 and have been the topic of heated debate ever since.
Theories of their origins have run the gamut from stellar explosions knowns as supernovas, to neutron stars, which are super-dense stellar fragments formed after the gravitational collapse of a star, and even extra-terrestrial signals, though astronomers have discounted the latter.
The latest discovery, published in the journal Nature, was made by piecing together observations from space and ground-based telescopes.
Both Bochenek’s STARE2 and the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment discovered the flare and attributed it to SGR 1935+2154.
Also playing a role in the discovery was the ultra-sensitive Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, in China, according to AFP.
Astronomers there had already keeping an eye on the magnetar, which was firing off X-ray and gamma ray bursts, according to Bing Zhang, a researcher at the University of Nevada and part of the team reporting on the discovery.
FAST did not spot the radio emission itself, he told reporters, but it did detect several X-ray bursts from the magnetar, raising new questions about why only one of the bursts was linked to an FRB.
Amanda Weltman and Anthony Walters, from the High Energy Physics, Cosmology and Astrophysics Theory Group at the University of Cape Town, said the link of the FRB to a magnetar “potentially solves a key puzzle” in the Universe.
But they said the discovery also raises new questions, including what mechanism would produce “such bright, yet rare, radio bursts with X-ray counterparts?
“One promising possibility is that a flare from a magnetar collides with the surrounding medium and thereby generates a shock wave,” they wrote in Nature, where they stressed the importance of international cooperation in astronomy.
