The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has recently made headlines with their discovery of Fast Radio Bursts (FRB) in the Milky Way for the first time. This newfound revelation has potential implications for future astronomical research.
Understanding Fast Radio Bursts (FRB)
FRBs are quick bursts of bright radio waves, which can be produced by astronomical objects possessing changing magnetic fields. Given their millisecond-scale durations, it’s quite challenging to detect them and define their exact position in the sky. The scientific community initially discovered FRBs in 2007.
Discovery of FRB in the Milky Way
NASA detected a unique mix of X-ray and radio signals in the Milky Way that had not been seen before. Several satellites, including NASA’s Wind mission, captured the X-ray part of the simultaneous bursts. Launched on November 1, 1994, Wind is a spin-stabilized spacecraft that has been orbiting around the L1 Lagrange point since early 2004, observing the unperturbed solar wind prepared to impact Earth’s magnetosphere.
The radio component was revealed by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME). CHIME is a novel, stationary radio telescope located at Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in British Columbia. Multiple universities jointly lead it, including McGill University in Montreal, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Toronto. Primarily devised to map hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, this innovative telescope has an impressively high “mapping speed.”
Source of FRB in the Milky Way
The recently detected FRB’s source in the Milky Way is a potent magnetic neutron star known as a magnetar, specifically SGR 1935+2154 or SGR 1935. This magnetar lies within the Vulpecula constellation and is estimated to be somewhere between 14,000-41,000 light-years away.
The FRB was part of one of the magnetar’s most substantial flare-ups, with the X-ray bursts lasting less than a second. The radio burst, far brighter than any previous radio emissions from magnetars in the Milky Way, lasted for a thousandth of a second. It is believed that this burst’s extraordinary nature is due to its occurrence close to or at the magnetar’s magnetic pole.
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) detected this hours-long flare-up. Both these tools are used extensively to study outer space phenomena.
What is a Magnetar?
According to NASA, a magnetar is a type of neutron star, which are the compact remains of a star significantly larger than the Sun. These stars possess extremely powerful magnetic fields, which can be over 10 trillion times stronger than a refrigerator magnet and up to a thousand times stronger than a typical neutron star’s.
Neutron stars form when a massive star’s core collapses under its gravity at the end of its life. The resulting matter is so densely packed that a sugar-cube sized portion weighs over 1 billion tons, comparable to Mount Everest’s weight.
Magnetars, a subclass of neutrons, sporadically release flares packing more energy in a fraction of a second than the Sun emits over tens of thousands of years. For instance, SGR 1935’s recent burst carried as much energy as the Sun produces in a month, assuming the magnetar lies towards the nearer end of its distance range.
