The entity in question is called a fast radio burst. Astronomers have observed a mysterious body emitting 1,652 bursts of energy in a short period.
A mysterious cosmic object has emitted 1,652 bursts of energy in a short period of time. That’s what has been observed by astronomers who, however, still can’t figure out what caused the repeated eruptions. The entity in question is called fast radio burst (FRB), an enigmatic phenomenon observed for the first time in 2007. FRBs produce pulses in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum; these pulses last only a few thousandths of a second but produce as much energy as the sun does in a year. The research team’s findings were published in the journal Nature.
What are fast radio bursts
While some FRBs emit energy only once, many others, including an object called FRB 121102, located in a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years away, are known to repeat their bursts. Most FRBs are located in the universe at a great distance from Earth, making them difficult to study. In 2020, however, scholars found a fast radio burst within our own galaxy, the Milky Way, which allowed them to determine that the source was a type of dead star called a magnetar.
Magnetars are formed from ultradense stellar corpses known as neutron stars. While all neutron stars have strong magnetic fields, some are characterized as having outliers with particularly intense magnetic fields that can warp their behavior, making them magnetars. It is still not certain, however, that all FRBs are magnetar and even in what way the magnetar give rise to fast radio bursts.
The research of astronomers on the mysterious cosmic object
In any case, the recent research, has used the radio telescope spherical aperture of five hundred meters (FAST) in China, to conduct an in-depth study just on FRB 121102. In fact, initially the team wanted to collect only routine data on the mysterious cosmic object, then the observation became more detailed. FAST, the world’s most sensitive radio telescope, was used to observe the element. Bing Zhang, an astrophysicist at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, explained that the researchers saw FRB 121102 explode 1,652 times up to 117 times per hour, far more than any previously known FRB.
Provided that FRB 121102 is a magnetar, the data collected by Zhang and his colleagues suggest that the rapid explosions are occurring right on the surface of the star itself, and not in the surrounding gas. Extreme magnetar magnetic fields, trillions of times stronger than Earth’s, can sometimes undergo violent episodes that emit bursts of energy from the material surrounding a star. FRB 121102, however, had explosions that occurred in quick succession, only a few thousand seconds apart. According to Zhang, this means that they could not have come from the surrounding gas because normally, after emitting radio waves, such shocked material would need time to cool down before releasing another explosion. Thanks to the incredible sensitivity of the FAST radio telescope, the team was able to capture this peculiarity of FRB 121102, which opens up new fields of investigation, yet to be analyzed, on the characteristics of fast radio bursts.
In the meantime, the mystery about the strange radio signal picked up in 2019 has recently been solved, while astronomers have identified another mysterious signal from the center of the galaxy that could be emitted by a dark neutron star.
Stefania Bernardini