Ever since their discovery more than a decade ago, enigmatic flashes of radio waves have puzzled astronomers. These “fast radio bursts” (FRBs) pop up with startling frequency and intensity all across the sky, each emerging from unknown faraway extragalactic sources and packing the power output of up to hundreds of millions of suns into just a few fleeting milliseconds.
Now researchers are closing in on their origins.
A team studying one particular FRB some three billion light years from Earth—known as FRB 121102, the only ever seen to repeat—has found it is engulfed by an extremely strong magnetic field. Such extreme magnetic fields have only previously been seen near neutron stars around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. The team suggests this FRB’s mysterious source is a very young and fast-spinning, highly magnetized neutron star—a “magnetar”—that may be orbiting a massive black hole. The findings are published in the January 11 edition of Nature.
“For the first time, we’re getting some sense of the environment around the burst’s source—remote sensing from three billion light years away!” says study co-author Shami Chatterjee, an astronomer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “We recognize this is piling one exotic thing atop another: We want an energetic magnetar without precedent, and we also want to put it next to a massive black hole. But we do have a similar example in our own galaxy.”The magnetars near the Milky Way’s center, however, have yet to be seen emitting FRBs, which tend to come from much, much further away.
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