Scientists got a strange feeling when they took a close look at a series of bright flashes in a galaxy just 12 million light-years away.
The flashes, known as a repeating fast radio burst, look similar to the flashes found in the Crab Nebula. The Crab Nebula is a famous remnant from an old stellar explosion that humans observed in 1054 AD. Researchers said that the colorful remnants looked a lot like the newly found FRBs.
Kenzie Nimmo, a PhD student in astronomy at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and the University of Amsterdam, said that some of the signals they measured were short and powerful.
The weird signal comes from the Milky Way. What is causing it?
The explosion in what is now the Crab Nebula was recorded in 1054 by a Chinese astronomer who saw a new star above the southern horn of Taurus. Theguest shone brightly in the sky for 23 days and was 6 times more powerful than Venus. It was visible for almost two years after the explosion.
The remnant was the best place to see it with a telescope, and it was only seen by British astronomer John Bevis in 1731. After observing it for 27 years, Charles Messier added it to his catalog and named it M1.
The Crab Nebula was discovered in the 1960s when a signal from a pulsar, a kind of stellar corpse left by a supernova, was detected.
Astronomers aren't sure yet what's happening in M 81, despite the known cause of the Crab Nebula's bursts and their similarity to those seen in M 81. The first glimpse of these FRBs was in January of 2020.
A network of twelve radio dishes pinpointed the source of the signal to an old group of stars known as a globular cluster, which is an exception to the fact that FRBs have mostly been found in galaxies studded with young stars.
The strongest magnets in the universe and a type of supernova remnant are what cause the bright flashes. This explanation makes sense where young stars are common, but it is difficult when it comes to M 81.
The University of Amsterdam and ASTRON expect magnetars to be shiny and new and not surrounded by old stars. There has to be a different way.
One possibility is that a white dwarf pulled gas off an unlucky star. The white dwarf may have collapsed into a magnetar due to the extra mass.
The scientists don't know what caused the signal or why it is so similar to the Crab Nebula, but they think it is something unusual.
The research was published in two papers, one led by Nimmo, and the other by Kirsten, who is with the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy.
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