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A Canadian research team has managed to identify a source of rapid radio bursts on Earth. The signals are sent by a magnet, a neutron star with an extremely strong magnetic field.
On April 28, 2020, experts detected an unusually strong radio burst with the CHIME (Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) telescopic network. Exceptionally, we were also able to identify the source: according to this, the radio signals were sent to us by a magnetar located in our galaxy, the Milky Way.
Based on the discovery, it appears that some of the rapid radio flares can certainly be attributed to these astronomical objects.
“According to our calculations, if a radio burst of this intensity had come from another galaxy, we would not be able to distinguish it from other similar signals, and this also shows that at least some of the fast radio bursts are radiated by magnets,” said Pragya Chawla. , Department of Physics, McGill University. coworker.
The discovery is reported in more detail in the journal Nature.
What is a fast radio eruption?
Fast Radio Bursts (FRB for short) were first identified more than ten years ago. At first, they were considered one-time events, but it soon became clear that some of them were repetitive. FRBs are shocks of very strong and short-lived cosmic radio waves that require as much energy as the Sun produces over millions of years.
The magnets
Some theories have already considered magnets as possible sources, but the theory has not been clearly substantiated to date.
So far, all the FRBs identified by telescopes as CHIME come from other galaxies, so we have not been able to study them in detail. ” He described the difficulties to Ziggy Pleunis, a researcher in the Department of Physics at McGill University, who co-authored the study. According to Pleunis, the search for potential sources has also been hampered by the fact that magnets in the Milky Way do not emit signals as strong as extragalactic radio eruptions.
Experts say that younger and therefore more active magnetars are conceivable to send out faster, higher-energy radio bursts, but this has yet to be proven. This would require the detection of an X-ray outbreak in parallel with the FRB, which has yet to occur.
CHIME continues to search for possible source objects.
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