Explosions of mysterious repetitive radio waves that ignite in a random pattern can blast asteroids with magnetic winds through neutron stars that travel at the speed of light, a new research finds.
Rapid radio bursts, or FRBs, are intense pulses of radio waves that can deliver a few thousandths of a thousand times more power than the sun in almost a century. Scientists only discovered FRBs in 2007, and due to their short existence much remains unknown about their origins.
Because rapid radio blasts are rare and bright – visible for millions or even billions of light-years – researchers have often assumed that they originated from catastrophic events such as star flares or colliding neutron stars. (Neutron stars are the corpses of stars that died in a catastrophic explosion known as supernovae; the gravity of the remnants of these stars is powerful enough to crush protons and electrons to form neutrons.)
Related: Scientists have discovered a strange ‘fast radio burst’ from our own galaxy.
The mystery of the rapid radio explosion erupted when scientists first hit the first repeating fast radio in 201 radio. When astronomers see recurring patterns in celestial phenomena, they often think that spatial mechanics may play a role – say, the planet completes its orbit around its star, or its lightning-like radiation from its magnetic poles as seen from Earth’s perspective. Fast spinning neutron star known as pulsar.
But the radio exploded at the 2016 event, surprisingly, had random timing.
Asteroids and neutron stars
Now researchers suggest that asteroids orbiting neutron stars could help explain at least some repetitive rapid radio explosions, albeit at random times. The key to this concept is that the strong winds of particles are always blowing from outside, not only from living stars like our sun, but also from dead creatures like pulsars. Because pulsars are so magnetic, their winds are also very fast, and because pulsars spin so fast, completing revolutions in seconds, their winds can explode at relative speeds – that is, at almost the speed of light.
Scientists calculated that something revolving around the pulsar – perhaps an asteroid – would set foot in the pulsar wind. An electric current revolves around this awakening, and when the pulsar wind crosses this awakening, the researchers calculated that the resulting magnetic interruption would produce a very narrow and extremely sharp beam of radio waves.
Researchers have noted that asteroids 0.6 to 6 miles wide (1 to 10 kilometers) will produce fast radio explosions of a detected intensity around their pulsars in or near an astronomical unit (AU), especially if the pulsars have a powerful magnetic field. (An AU is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun, which is about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers.)
Scientists have noticed that the asteroid zipping through the pulsar’s extremely magnetic, superfast wind produces a constant sharp radio beam. In the rare case of neutron stars, asteroids and telescopes connecting to each other on Earth, astronomers on Earth will only see this beam as the first.
“The short duration of radio explosions is due to the short duration during which we observers are in the radio beam,” said Fabrice Mottze, lead author of the astrophysicist at the French National Center for Scientific Research and the Paris Observatory. .
Facing the magnet wind
Researchers have also discovered what a repetition of rapid radio explosions can be when created by asteroids flying through the magnetar’s highly magnetic, highly relative wind, the strongest magnet in the universe, a rare type of neutron star. They discovered that asteroids around magnets could produce rapid radio explosions that were a thousand times more powerful than the ones seen today.
If this explanation is correct, the random pattern of repeating rapid radio explosions is likely to be interfered with the neutron star’s wind by a cluster of ids asteroids, scientists noted, instead of a single stone. “In our model, there are several hundred asteroids, each with its own beam,” Motez said. A moon-filled exoplanet around a pulsar or magnet could also explain the phenomenon, the researchers noted.
Mortez said the gravitational interaction between the asteroids in the swarms could lead to irregularities in each of their orbits, which could lead to inequality in the timing of any explosions detected by astronomers.
In addition, the magnetic fields of pulsars and magnets et al fluctuate regularly with the spinning rates of these neutron stars over time, which in turn will influence the directions of the radio beam from any rotating object and possibly appear more random over time, he added. He said another cause of randomness, perhaps most importantly, would be wind instability.
Scientists A paper accepted by the Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics on the 7th detailed their findings, which were also posted on the print server arXiv.org.
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