The researchers made the announcement yesterday That they have solved a question that has haunted them for a decade: what exactly produces a strange phenomenon known as rapid radio bursts? As the name implies, FRBs have a sudden blast of radio-frequency radiation that lasts only a few microseconds. Even astronomers did not know that they existed until 2007, but since then they have cataloged hundreds of them; Some come from a source that emits them frequently, while others explode once and become silent.
Obviously, you can generate this kind of sudden energy by destroying something. But the existence of repetitive sources suggests that at least some of them are created by creation that survives the event. This has led to a focus on compact object objects such as neutron stars and black holes, in which the class of neutron stars, known as magnetars, is viewed with great skepticism.
Those suspicions have now been raised, as scientists have observed that a magnet in our own galaxy emits high-power gamma rays at the same time it was sending an FRB. This does not answer all of our questions, as we are not yet sure how FRBs are generated or why only a few gamma-ray radiations from these magnets et are associated with FRBs. But confirmation will give us a chance to look more closely at the extreme physics of magnets as we try to understand what is happening.
‘Magnetar’ is not the latest superhero film
Magnetars are neutron stars, an extreme form of celestial body that is already significant for being heavy. They are the bases of the collapse of a giant star, so much so that atoms go out of existence, igniting neutrons and protons. That mass is roughly the same as that of the Sun – but is compressed into a sphere with a radius of about 10 kilometers. Neutron stars are known to power pulsars, quickly repeating these radioactive explosions driven by the fact that these large objects can complete rotation in a handful of milliseconds.
A different kind of magnet is extreme. They do not rotate rapidly, but have a strong magnetic field. However we do not know whether those fields are inherited from a very magnetic parent star or produced by a superconducting material around a neutron star. Whatever the source, those magnetic fields are about a trillion times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field. It is strong enough to distort the electron orbitals in the molecule, effectively removing the chemistry for any common matter that somehow comes close to the magnet. While the period of high magnetic fields is a few thousand years before the scattering of fields, there are enough neutron stars to keep a regular supply of the surrounding magnets.
Their magnetic fields can give power to very energetic phenomena, either by accelerating the particles or by magnetic disturbances driven by physical migration into neutron stars. Consequently, magnets are characterized by their semicircular output of high-X-ray X-rays and low-energy X-ray gamma rays, dubbed “soft gamma-ray repeaters” or SGRs. Many of them have been identified inside the galaxy, including SGR 1935 + 2154.
In late April of this year, SGR 1935 + 2154 entered an active phase, sending a number of high-level photons taken by the Swift Observatory into orbit around the Earth. It was completely normal. What was not common was that a number of radio observatories selected specific FRBs at the same time.
Star and one time
The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment or Chime is a large array of radio antennas that were originally built for other reasons but have proved great for FRB viewing, as it can continuously observe a wide strip of sky. SGR 1935 + 2154 was on the edge of its field of view, i.e. there were some uncertainties in its source identification, but the results were clearly consistent with the connection between FRB and gamma ray output.
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