An electromagnetic energy explosion of Staccato has been tracked in an old dead galaxy for the first time. The discovery supports the idea that there are more ways to produce such flares, called fast radius bursts, of what was originally thought.
Fast radio explosions, or FRBS, are rashes of a millisecond of intense radio waves. Astronomers have observed thousands of these explosions, but only around 100 date back to their origins, says astronomer Tarraneh Eftekhari of the Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Almost all came from animated neighborhoods full of young stars.
From February to July 2024, the Chime Radio Setting matrix in Canada detected 22 explosions of a FRB called FRB 20240209A. Six of these bursts were also detected almost 70 kilometers away in an auxiliary auxiliary telescope called k’niʔatn k’l◡stk’masqt, which means “a listening device for external space” in the language of the upper people Similkameen.
Combining those signs, they let Eftekhari and his colleagues triangulate the location of the FRB in the sky. Surprisingly, came Outside an old galaxyabout 11 billion years, whose The years of star formation are behind thisThe team reported in two documents on February 1 Astrophysical Diary Letters.
Astronomers think that FRBs come mainly from magnetized stellar corpses called Magnetars, which are remains of supernova explosions. Such supernovas are expected where many stars are actively formed, not in an old galaxy, and certainly not so far from the center of the galaxy.
“The host galaxy is a dead galaxy,” says co -author Vishwangi Shah, an astronomer from McGill University in Montreal. “So, the question is: how are such energy signals from such a space region?”
Another stranger FRB could offer a track. In 2021, astronomers found a FRB emanating from a globular group, a tight ball of mostly old stars in a relatively close galaxy. That explosion inspired astronomers to think about age or dead stars could form Magnetars. Perhaps the magnetarians come from white dwarfs that collapse under their own gravity, for example, or the remains of two neutron stars that collide.
The team has requested observations with the James Webb space telescope to see if there is a globular cluster in the place from which the new FRB comes.
“I think the magnetarians are still a story of convincing origin for FRBS,” says Efftekhari. “But I think what this discovery tells us is that there are probably multiple ways in which Magnetars can form that produce FRB.”
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