In a galaxy not so far-off, astronomers have situated a shocking supply of a mysterious, fast radio sign.
The sign, a repeating quick radio burst, or FRB, was noticed over a number of months in 2021, permitting astronomers to pinpoint its location to a globular cluster — a good, spherical cluster of stars — in M81, an enormous spiral galaxy 12 million light-years away. The findings, revealed February 23 in Nature, are difficult astronomers’ assumptions of what objects create FRBs.
“This is a very revolutionary discovery,” says Bing Zhang, an astronomer on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who was not concerned within the research. “It is exciting to see an FRB from a globular cluster. That is not the favorited place people imagined.”
Sign Up For the Latest from Science News
Headlines and summaries of the most recent Science News articles, delivered to your inbox
Thank you for signing up!
There was an issue signing you up.
Astronomers have been puzzling over these mysterious cosmic radio indicators, which usually final lower than a millisecond, since their discovery in 2007 (SN: 7/25/14). But in 2020, an FRB was seen in our personal galaxy, serving to scientists decide one supply should be magnetars — younger, extremely magnetized neutron stars with magnetic fields a trillion occasions as robust as Earth’s (SN: 6/4/20).
The new findings come as a shock as a result of globular clusters harbor solely outdated stars — a few of the oldest within the universe. Magnetars, however, are younger leftover dense cores sometimes created from the demise of short-lived huge stars. The magnetized cores are thought to lose the power wanted to provide FRBs after about 10,000 years. Globular clusters, whose stars common many billions of years outdated, are a lot too aged to have had a sufficiently current younger stellar demise to create the sort of magnetar.
To pinpoint the FRB, astronomer Franz Kirsten and colleagues used an online of 11 radio telescopes unfold throughout Europe and Asia to catch 5 bursts from the identical supply. Combining the radio observations, the astronomers had been in a position to zero in on the sign’s origins, discovering it was virtually definitely from inside a globular cluster.
“This is a very exciting discovery because it was completely unexpected,” says Kirsten, of ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, who is predicated on the Onsala Space Observatory in Sweden.
The new FRB may nonetheless be attributable to a magnetar, the workforce proposes, however one which fashioned another way, equivalent to from outdated stars frequent in globular clusters. For instance, this magnetar might have been created from a remnant stellar core referred to as a white dwarf that had gathered an excessive amount of materials from a companion star, inflicting it to break down.
“This is a [magnetar] formation channel that has been predicted, but it’s hard to see,” Kirsten says. “Nobody has actually seen such an event.”
Alternatively, the magnetar might have been fashioned from the merger of two stars — equivalent to a pair of white dwarfs, a pair of neutron stars or one in every of every — in shut orbit round each other, however this state of affairs is much less probably, Kirsten says. It’s additionally potential the FRB supply isn’t a magnetar in any respect however a really energetic millisecond pulsar, which can be a kind of neutron star that might be present in a globular cluster, however one which has a weaker magnetic area.
To date, only some FRB sources have been exactly pinpointed, and their areas are all in or near star-forming areas in galaxies. Besides including a brand new supply for FRBs, the findings recommend that magnetars created from one thing aside from the demise of younger stars is perhaps extra frequent than anticipated.