A new study has provided the first definitive evidence that fast radio bursts can originate from the magnetosphere, the highly magnetic environment immediately surrounding very compact objects.
Artist's impression of a neutron star. Image credit: Sci.News.
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are short, brilliant bursts of radio waves that originate primarily from extragalactic distances.
These phenomena release as much energy in one millisecond as the sun does in 10,000 years, but the physics that cause them are unknown.
Theories range from a highly magnetized neutron star exploded by a stream of gas near a supermassive black hole to proposals whose outburst characteristics match the signature of technology developed by an advanced civilization.
MIT astronomer Kenzie Nimmo and colleagues focused on the event, dubbed FRB 20221022A, in a new study.
This burst was first detected by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) in 2022.
The event occurred in a galaxy about 200 million light years away and lasted about 2 milliseconds.
New research suggests that FRB 20221022A emerged from a region extremely close to the rotating neutron star, up to 10,000 km away.
At such close distances, the burst could have originated from the neutron star's magnetosphere, a highly magnetic region immediately surrounding the microstar.
“In a neutron star environment like this, the magnetic field is actually at the limit of what the universe can produce,” Dr. Nimmo said.
“There has been a lot of discussion about whether this bright radio emission can leak out of that extreme plasma.”
“Atoms cannot exist around these highly magnetic neutron stars, also known as magnetars. They are simply torn apart by the magnetic field,” added astronomer Kiyoshi Masui of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“What's interesting here is that we found that the energy stored in magnetic fields gets twisted and rearranged near the source of the magnetic field and is emitted as radio waves visible on the far side of the universe.”
of findings appear in the diary nature.
_____
K.Nimo others. 2025. Magnetospheric origin of fast radio bursts confined using scintillation. nature 637, 48-51; doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-08297-w
Source: www.sci.news
