One lesson astronomy teaches is to never sit back and think.
Fast Radio Bursts is a weird phenomenon that was first discovered in the early 2000s. These are very bright but very short bursts of radio energy. It was difficult to understand where they were coming from when they came so quickly.
A breakthrough came in 2016 when one FRB was seen to repeat several times. There were more repeaters found and one was found in our home galaxy. A person has been seen to repeat 1,600 times.
Astronomers have concluded that the sources of FRBs are magnetars, a type of super dense neutron star with mind-crushingly powerful magnetic fields, some with a quadrillion times the strength of Earth's magnetic field! Young neutron stars are thought to be capable of generating these ridiculous characteristics.
And then there was another.
It was first seen on January 20, 2020 and was determined to be a repeat. The community was excited because it was close to the nearby galaxy M 81, which is a very well-studied and spectacular spiral only 11 million light years from Earth. It made FRB 20200120E close because most of them are hundreds of millions of light years away.
There was a problem with getting an accurate position. Was it coming from M 81?
A team of astronomer using telescopes from around and above the Earth now have the answer to the question, "Are you from M 81 or from PR95?"
That is really weird. There are tens of thousands or millions of stars packed together in a tight space, and they are all in the same place. There are probably lots of old stars in a globular. Very old. It's probably too old to produce a magnetar in a cluster that's 10 billion years old.
What is it that gives? The location observations are pretty conclusive, they used a technique called interferometry which links up radio telescopes across the world to achieve phenomenal resolution. They spotted five FRBs coming from the same spot over a few months in early 2021, and all five were fast; the longest one was a third of a millisecond in duration, just 300 microseconds! The angle of the data is so small that you can see a US quarter coin on the North Pole. The data shows that the FRB is close to the center of the cluster. There is a galaxy in the sky near the cluster, but it is far away and cannot be the source.
It is possible that there could be young stars in a globular. If there had been a pair of Sun-like stars, they would both die and leave behind white dwarfs, which are extremely dense objects the size of the Earth but with about the mass of the Sun. Over billions of years the two dead stars would spiral together and create a new star. It is1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556
It is possible that it is not a magnetar. A white dwarf that is so close to a neutron star that it may be in a pre-merger phase could sometimes erupt as material from the white dwarf falls onto the neutron star.
No other light can be seen from FRB 20200120E. You would expect extremely high-energy forms of light, such as X-rays, to be present in a lot of these scenarios. That is also weird. These bursts are hard to see. It is difficult to devote time to staring at a source that may or may not be visible, so it may be a while before new information about FRB 20200120E comes from other wavelengths of light.
The mystery of where FRB 20200120E is located has been solved, only to be replaced by another mystery: What is the engine behind it? If it is still a magnetar or a neutron star that raises further questions, they are hard to answer. More observations will likely help during a scientific investigation. It is nice to see the database of knowledge about these enigmatic bursts broadening, and it is also cool to see the Universe still throwing us surprises. It makes this more enjoyable.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
