Tau.Neutrino said:
Scientists Publish First Study of Mysterious Fast Radio Burst-Like Event in Milky Way
A dead star 14,350 light-years away has just become the most important clue in solving the mystery of fast radio bursts. Earlier this year, it spat out a colossal, milliseconds-long radio flare – and now the first published analysis of the event notes its similarity to the enigmatic extragalactic signals.
More…
> In the case of the event earlier this year, it was a magnetar called SGR 1935+2154 that was detected emitting a millisecond-duration burst of radio waves by instruments around the world.
A magnetar, hey. Good.
> Only very rarely have magnetars been caught emitting radio waves.
> Astronomers pay attention to magnetar outbursts because we don’t know a lot about how their magnetic fields are the way they are, and any activity we can observe of the phenomenon could help shed some light. So when SGR 1935+2154 started getting rumbly in late April, monitoring instruments around the world were turned in its direction. Initially, it looked like a pretty standard magnetar outburst, but on 28 April, the unprecedented occurred: a very bright radio flare that looked shockingly similar to a fast radio burst, detected by multiple instruments.
> It was so bright that the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) telescope – designed to detect transient events, and responsible for discovering a good number of FRBs – couldn’t quite quantify it. That’s not because the flare was intrinsically more powerful than extragalactic FRBs (it was actually intrinsically weaker), but because it was so much closer.
> By using data collected by the European Space Agency’s INTEGRAL satellite, Mereghetti and his team positively associated the signal with the magnetar, and analysed and characterised it. Crucially, the IBIS imager on Integral allowed us to precisely pinpoint the origin of the burst, nailing its association with the magnetar.
Good.