Space & Astronomy

MIT scientists trace anomalous energy burst to distant galaxy

By T.K. Randall
January 3, 2025 ·  0 comments

An artist's impression of a neutron star. Image Credit: NASA / Penn State University These intense and mysterious signals, which last mere milliseconds yet can reach a brightness equivalent to that of an entire galaxy, have long remained something of an astronomical enigma since their discovery almost 20 years ago.

While some speculated that these bursts could be an attempt by a distant extraterrestrial civilization to communicate across the cosmos, astronomers quickly determined that the most likely source of these signals were neutron stars - the extremely dense remnants of supernova explosions which typically rotate tens of thousands of times per minute.

Now, in a new study, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has succeeded in tracing the origin of one of these bursts - a signal that was first picked up back in 2022 and is thought to have come from a galaxy some 200 million light-years away.

The findings indicated that the burst had originated within close proximity of a neutron star and not only that, but that the burst must have been produced by the star's magnetosphere."In these environments of neutron stars, the magnetic fields are really at the limits of what the universe can produce," said study lead author Kenzie Nimmo.

"There's been a lot of debate about whether this bright radio emission could even escape from that extreme plasma."

The team's discovery has been hailed as a significant step forward in fast radio burst research.

"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," said MIT physicist Kiyoshi Masui.

Source: Extreme Tech | Comments (0)

Tags: Fast Radio Burst