Scientists Trace Fast Radio Burst to Surprise Source For First Time
When a magnetar within the Milky Way galaxy belched out a flare of colossally powerful radio waves in 2020, scientists finally had concrete evidence to pin down an origin for fast radio bursts.
A mind-blowing new study has now narrowed down the mechanism. By studying the twinkling light of a fast radio burst detected in 2022, a team of astronomers has traced its source to the powerful magnetic field around a magnetar, in a galaxy 200 million light-years away.
"In these environments of neutron stars, the magnetic fields are really at the limits of what the Universe can produce," says astrophysicist Kenzie Nimmo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) have puzzled scientists since they were first discovered in 2007. They are, as the name suggests, extremely brief bursts of radio emission, lasting just milliseconds. They're also extremely powerful, sometimes releasing more energy than 500 million Suns in that brief blink of time.
FRBs are hard to study because most of the time, they burst only once. This makes them impossible to predict, and tricky – but not impossible – to trace back to a source. A number of one-off FRBs have been traced to galaxies across millions to billions of light-years of space-time.
