Zhang Shuangnan, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, explained a new discovery on Friday about the source of rapid radio bursts at a news conference in Beijing. JIN LIWANG / XINHUA
Chinese scientists have confirmed that rapid radio eruptions – extremely powerful but short flashes in the cosmos – could be coming from magnets, celestial objects with a magnetic strength of about 100 trillion times stronger than Earth, according to a study conducted Friday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
This was the first confirmation of such an achievement, and the findings will be important to understand one of the most mysterious events in the universe, said Zhang Shuangnan, a researcher at the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy for Science, said.
Since their discovery in 2007, FRBs have fascinated astronomers because they can release a large amount of energy within thousands of a second, making them a notoriously elusive phenomenon to study. What’s more surprising is that some FRBs may repeat, which has fueled many theories, ranging from star collisions to activities by alien civilizations.
“There were more than 560,000 search results on FRBs and foreigners on the Chinese search engine Baidu, compared to about 3.5 million results on the actual FRBs themselves,” he said. “It shows that the public is very interested in the mysteries of FRBs, and speculation is very high.”
Scientists have assumed that FRBs can be emitted by a special class of neutron stars – super-dense remnants of massive stars – called magnetars. However, most of the known FRBs come from distant galaxies billions of light-years away, so scientists struggle to identify their sources, as most telescopes are not sensitive enough to see them.
A golden opportunity arose in April last year when an FRB went down in our Milky Way and was detected by instruments from the United States and Canada, according to studies published in the journal Nature last year.
The FRB occurred about 30,000 light-years away, close enough to be able to observe our telescopes. The FRB was called FRB200428 and scientists believed the culprit was a magnetar called SGR J1935 + 2154, which was in the general direction of the event.
While more studies have been done to confirm that the magnetar was the source, the discovery of a highly probable origin of FRBs was exciting enough to cite the journals Nature and Science as one of the greatest scientific achievements of last year.
As an FRB spews out high-energy electric magnetic radiation such as X-rays and gamma rays, Chinese scientists have used the country’s first X-ray telescope, the Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope, also known as ‘Insight’ to study the study. study. X-ray bursts from the magnetar.
Zhang, who is also the lead scientist behind Insight, said that given the fact that X-rays can penetrate interstellar mediums faster than radio waves, there should be a small gap between the time the X-ray signals and the FRB radio waves reach Earth. .
Thanks to the latest equipment on Insight, launched in 2017, scientists discovered that the time gap was 8.62 seconds, which corresponds to the amount of time the radio wave signal was delayed by the interstellar medium. This confirmed that the X-ray bursts and FRB were from the same event.
In addition, Insight, with accurate measurement of the X-ray burst, determined that it was coming from the magnetar. This discovery, together with the results of other telescopes, proves that FRBs can originate from magnetars and thus solve the long puzzle about the origin of FRBs.