What is this violent astrophysical mystery solved thanks to a network of European telescopes
The Westerbork synthetic telescope manages to connect FRBs to young neutron stars. © van Leeuwen / Astron
Using the Westerbork radio telescope network, a team of astronomers has solved the great two-decade-old mystery of FRBs by linking them to very young, dead, highly magnetic stars: neutron stars.
The Westerbork radio telescope network in the Netherlands. © Wikipedia
What are Fast Radio Bursts?
In 2007, the American astronomer Duncan Lorimer discovered that the so-called galaxy Small Magellanic Cloud is crossed by an ultra brief and powerful energetic flash, of an absolutely unknown nature at the time. It even seems to come from 3 billion light years further than the small galaxy neighboring ours. At the time, it was the first Fast Radio Burst (rapid radio burst in French) known. A typical FRB lasts about 1 millisecond and concentrates more energy than the entire output of the Sun for an entire month. In summary, it is both violent and brief!
These FRBs were all the more intriguing because at the time, we had absolutely no idea of their cause and everything was imagined. Why not messages from a highly developed extraterrestrial civilization? THE SETIa very serious North American institute responsible for tracking down all forms of cosmic intelligence, got involved. After the discovery of dozens of other signals coming from all directions, this hypothesis vanished.
Dozens of FRBs are found coming from all directions
FRB 150418 detected in a giant elliptical galaxy. Right, radio peak detected by the Parkes telescope. © it’s-happening-up there
The quest for FRBs intensified in particular in the mid-2010s, with astrophysicists excited at the idea of potentially discovering a new type of star, perhaps even weirder than a black hole. This is the time when we began to find them almost everywhere around us in the Universe.
Two years of observations and the investigation finds its solution
Inés Pastor-Marazuela (Astron), the main author of the study published in Astronomy & Astrophysicsexplain : “We were able to study these bursts with an incredible level of detail. We find that their shape is very similar to what we see in young neutron stars […] The way the radio flashes were produced, and then modified as they traveled through space over billions of years, is also consistent with a neutron star origin, making the conclusion even stronger.”
