MIT Scientists Pin Down The Origins Of A Fast Radio Burst

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Fast radio bursts are brief and brilliant explosions of radio waves emitted by extremely compact objects such as neutron stars and possibly black holes. These fleeting fireworks last for just a thousandth of a second and can carry an enormous amount of energy - enough to briefly outshine entire galaxies.

Since the first fast radio burst (FRB) was discovered in 2007, astronomers have detected thousands of FRBs, whose locations range from within our own galaxy to as far as 8 billion light-years away. Exactly how these cosmic radio flares are launched is a highly contested unknown.

Now, astronomers at MIT have pinned down the origins of at least one fast radio burst using a novel technique that could do the same for other FRBs. In their new study, appearing today in the journal Nature, the team focused on FRB 20221022A - a previously discovered fast radio burst that was detected from a galaxy about 200 million light-years away.

The team zeroed in further to determine the precise location of the radio signal by analyzing its scintillation," similar to how stars twinkle in the night sky. The scientists studied changes in the FRB's brightness and determined that the burst must have originated from the immediate vicinity of its source, rather than much further out, as some models have predicted.

The team estimates that FRB 20221022A exploded from a region that is extremely close to a rotating neutron star, 10,000 kilometers away at most. That's less than the distance between New York and Singapore. At such close range, the burst likely emerged from the neutron star's magnetosphere - a highly magnetic region immediately surrounding the ultracompact star.

The team's findings provide the first conclusive evidence that a fast radio burst can originate from the magnetosphere, the highly magnetic environment immediately surrounding an extremely compact object.

In these environments of neutron stars, the magnetic fields are really at the limits of what the universe can produce," says lead author Kenzie Nimmo, a postdoc in MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. There's been a lot of debate about whether this bright radio emission could even escape from that extreme plasma."

Around these highly magnetic neutron stars, also known as magnetars, atoms can't exist - they would just get torn apart by the magnetic fields," says Kiyoshi Masui, associate professor of physics at MIT. The exciting thing here is, we find that the energy stored in those magnetic fields, close to the source, is twisting and reconfiguring such that it can be released as radio waves that we can see halfway across the universe."

Detections of fast radio bursts have ramped up in recent years, due to the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME). The radio telescope array comprises four large, stationary receivers, each shaped like a half-pipe, that are tuned to detect radio emissions within a range that is highly sensitive to fast radio bursts.

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