There is a strange signal coming from across the chasm of time and space.
A repeating fast radio burst source was detected last year and recorded spitting out more than one thousand bursts over the course of 81 hours.
Scientists have been able to understand not just the source and its distance from us but also what it is.
The object was discovered with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope in China and described in a new paper.
Most of the evidence points to a magnetar as the source of the emissions.
It looks like an unusual specimen if it is from one of these beasts.
Bing Zhang is an astronomer at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
FRBs are more mysterious than we have thought. There is more that needs to be done to reveal the nature of these objects.
A spike of incredibly powerful radio emission lasting just an eyeblink of time, known as a fast radio burst, has been a source of puzzlement to astronomy since they were first discovered fifteen years ago.
In that moment as much power as 500 million Suns have been detected since then.
They are difficult to study because they have erupted just the once. Scientists have been able to trace them to host galaxies because of a small number of repeat detections.
A breakthrough will happen in 2020. For the first time, a fast radio burst was detected in the center of the universe.
There are many examples of a rare repeater. The biggest sample of fast radio burst data with polarization has been given by FRB 202011 24A.
Light waves in three-dimensional space are referred to as polarization. Scientists can understand the environment through which the light has passed by looking at how the orientation has changed since it left the source. A powerful magnetic environment is suggested by strong polarisation.
Astronomers were able to deduce that the source is a magnetar based on the wealth of data delivered.
There was something odd about it. Over time, the strength of the magnetic field and density of particles around the magnetar changed.
The film revealed a complex, dynamically evolving, magnetized environment that was never imagined before.
It's not easy to expect an isolated magnetar environment. There is a possibility that something is in the vicinity of the FRB engine.
The data suggests that the companion could be a blue Be- type star. The evidence for this was presented in a paper by an astronomer.
There was more to it than that.
Magnetars are the collapsed cores of massive stars that have run out of fuel and are collapsing under their own weight.
Such stars have short lives, expelling their outer material as the core collapses.
Young magnetars are thought to be found in regions where star formation is still going on. More clouds of material are created when stars live their short lives and die. It's a beautiful place to live.
The Milky Way and FRB 20201124A are very similar. There isn't a lot of star formation going on here at home, so there shouldn't be a baby boom of stars near our strange friend.
There's more than one FRB source in a galaxy that isn't filled with star formation.
There is some vital piece of information that we may be missing and there is a hole in our understanding of the locations in which they live.
We now have a new place to look for answers. According to the work of Wang and his colleagues, the best place to look for radio burst-like signals is in the stars.
Two papers have been published.
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