Researchers from the US, Canada and China independently reached that conclusion.
This is the Inside Science Story.
Astronomers have detected very sharp and brief explosions of radio waves since 2007, but have not yet noticed what caused them to form. Explosions have fueled a variety of speculations about their origin, ranging from stellar explosions or neighboring alien cultures.
Now that this speculation may be quickly resolved, three teams of scientists have found a clear and plausible source for the amazing pulses, known as “fast radio bursts” or FRBs. Using different telescopes, teams from the United States, Canada and China independently studied the FRB since April which originated 30,000 light-years away and lasted only one millisecond, and all three came to the same conclusion: it probably originated from a magnet in our own. Galaxy.
A magnet is the rotating core of a giant dead star with a powerful magnetic field. U.S. According to Christopher Bochenek, a leading Caltech astronomer based research, magnetars are so large that the weight of a spoon can be as much as 1000 pyramids of Giza. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
“This discovery makes it plausible that most rapid radio explosions come from magnetars,” Bochenek said. He said the radio explosion was thousands of times stronger than any other matter in the galaxy.
So far, astronomers have struggled to explain why some FRBs are not one-event f events like supernova explosions, but seem to be repeating themselves instead. Magnetars can provide the answer, as they spin slowly and flare up periodically like lighthouse beacons. It is also enough to be the source of other explosions that scientists have seen inside and outside our galaxy.
Bochenek and his team pulled out the FRB with a network of small radio antennas called STRE2s, spread across California and Utah, to help identify the locations of explosions and distinguish them from radio signals produced by people on Earth. Canadian astronomers using a large number of CHIME telescopes in British Columbia similarly attributed a magnet to the FRB, and a Chinese collaboration with its own radio telescope came up with consistent findings.
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