Since 2007, strange bursts of radius of milliseconds that come from different points of the cosmos have been captured. They are colossal power, comparable to the amount of energy that modern human civilization could produce for tens of billions of years. Since the discovery of the first in 2007, many more have been detected. These emissions are called “rapid bursts of radio waves” (or FRBS). Recently, the nature of its generation mechanism seemed to be about to clarify. But a new observation has baffled the astronomical community and demonstrates that the enigma is still far from resolving.
Some FRBS broadcasters seem to be occasional while others repeat them after a while.
An integrated team, among others, by Calvin Leung, from the University of California in Berkeley, United States, and Vishwangi Shah, from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, prepared a computer program to combine observations from several radio telescopes so that this It allowed a triangulation capable of revealing the exact position of an emitting source located at some point in the constellation of the minor OSA and then enabling its observation with optical telescopes.
However, the location of the source, which issued the gust classified by the name of FRB 20240209A, has caused a great bewilderment. Instead of being immersed in a galaxy with sufficient activity, the source is in an area of the cosmos quite empty, next to an elliptical galaxy with very low activity, from 11.3 billion years of age and located at 2,000 million years-years From Earth. And that galaxy, mostly populated by old stars, could hardly contain some star star that had been considered lately as the fruit generation mechanism: a neutron star of the type known as magnetar.
Framed within the concentric ovals drawn, the point from which the strange radio waves were issued. To its right is the elliptical galaxy (the large yellow oval). (Image: Gemini Observatory)
If that galaxy ever had Magnetares, it was in a distant time. And, over time since then, they must have undergone changes that have led them to lose their ability to generate FRBS. On the other hand, it is highly unlikely that a magnetar has been created in a recent past in another part of the cosmos with the appropriate conditions and that it has then traveled until you get here.
This FRBS source is not the first located on the distant periphery of an old galaxy and of little activity, but it is the furthest from a galaxy among all the French sources known so far.
In short, rapid bursts of radio waves remain an unsolved mystery.
The study is titled “A Repeating Fast Radio Burst Source in the Outskirts of a Quiescent Galaxy”. And it has been published in the academic magazine The Astrophysical Journal Letters. (Fountain: Amazings NCYT)
(Tagstotranslate) FRB 20240209A (T) FRBS (T) rapid radio waves
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