Fast Radio Burst from 30k-yr-old dead star in space found closer to Earth than ever before

Mysterious ‘fast radio burst’ has been detected closer to the Earth than ever before. It is believed that a dead star which lied on the other side of the Milky Way thirty thousand years ago, belched out a powerful mixture of radio and X-ray energy. On April 28th this year, the belch swept over Earth that triggered alarms at observatories around the world.  

According to Space.com, the signal was there and gone in half a second. However, that was enough for scientists to confirm they had detected something remarkable. As published in The Astrological Journal Letters, scientists detected the first-ever “fast radio burst” to emanate from a known star within the Milky Way.

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What is a Fast Radio burst (FRB)?

Reportedly, Fast Radio burst was discovered in the year 2007 and has puzzled scientists ever since. The bursts of powerful radio waves last only a few milliseconds at most but they generate more energy in that time than Earth’s sin does in a century. Researchers are trying to find out what causes these blasts, and they have proposed everything from colliding black holes to the pulse of alien starships as possible explanations. Reportedly, every known FRB has originated from another galaxy, which is hundreds of millions of light-years away.

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However, Space.com reported that this Fast Radio Burst is different. Telescope observations suggest that the burst came from a known neutron star which is the fast-spinning, compact core of a dead star. The stellar remnant fits into an even stranger class of star called a magnetar, which has been named for its incredibly powerful magnetic field. It is capable of spitting out intense amounts of energy long after the star itself has died. It now seems that magnetars are almost certainly the source of at least some of the universe’s many cryptic fast radio burst.

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Space.com reported that the authors of this study said in a statement that they have never seen a burst of radio waves, resembling a fast radio burst from a magnetar before. The author further revealed that this is the first-ever observational connection between magnetars and fast radio bursts. ESA scientists Erik Kuulkers added to the statements, as reported by Space.com that this finding was only possible because multiple telescopes on Earth and in orbit were able to catch the burst simultaneously and in many wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum.

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Image credits: The European Space Agency (www.esa.int)