Brief and bright, fast and furious, uncommonly pure. Fast radio bursts have baffled astronomers since their discovery six years ago, but now they are revealing their true nature.
Two new studies suggest that FRBs are as common as dirt, that they produce more energy in a millisecond than the sun does in a million years, and that their single, intense flash of radio waves may be created when a neutron star is severed from its magnetic field as it collapses into a black hole. This explanation has also led to a more evocative name – blitzars – after the German word blitz for lightning.
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