NEW ORLEANS — A mind-bogglingly strong spurt of electromagnetic energy has for the first time been traced back to a cluster of seven merging galaxies. The finding could bolster the hypothesis that such mysterious flareups, known as fast radio bursts, originate from bizarre, highly magnetized dead stars called magnetars.
“We think they’re caused by some kind of very compact object, like a magnetar,” Alexa Gordon, an astronomer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., said January 9 during a news conference at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting. Researchers previously spotted a magnetar in our galaxy producing an FRB, though nobody has shown that all such bursts can be attributed to magnetars (SN: 6/4/20).
Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Gordon and her colleagues took a closer look at where FRB 20220610A, the most powerful and distant FRB discovered to date, came from. The team was surprised to find a collection of seven galaxies located 11 billion light-years from Earth, all crammed inside a region the size of the Milky Way.
“We expected some kind of monolithic spiral galaxy,” says Northwestern astronomer Wen-fai Fong. “It was kind of a jarring image.”
2024-01-10 12:43:23
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