For a long time, space scientists have been wondering about what causes certain extreme radio events in space which result in powerful and fast bursts of radio waves. Now scientists have come one step closer to understanding this phenomenon called ‘fast radio bursts’ after NASA’s two X-ray telescopes captured a dead star exploding in radio waves. This explosion, which lasted for just a second, emitted just as much energy as the sun released in one whole year. What made this explosion even more interesting is that it emitted laser-like beams of light instead of being a chaotic explosion.
The scientists have detailed these observations in a paper that was recently accepted in the scientific journal Nature. The 20-page long paper is titled, “Rapid spin changes around a magnetar fast radio burst.” Before this study, space scientists had wondered about the origin of fast radio bursts. These radio bursts are brief and come from outside our galaxy. In 2020, scientists reached a breakthrough when they observed that the remains of a collapsed star, called a magnetar, emitted brief but intense radio bursts inside our galaxy.
Two years later, in October 2022, the same magnetar, named SGR 1935+2154, emitted another fast radio burst. This time NASA researchers were lucky to capture and study this explosion with the help of two X-ray telescopes, namely the NICER (Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer) installed on the International Space Station and NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) set up on the low Earth orbit.
The telescopes documented the magnetar for hours and captured what happened on its surface and immediate surroundings, before and after the fast radio burst. As per an article published on the website of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the ‘fast radio burst’ happened between “two glitches” when the magnetar suddenly started spinning at the estimated speed of 7,000 mph (11,000 kph).
Chin-Ping Hu, an astrophysicist and the lead author of the study, said, “Typically when glitches happen, it takes the magnetar weeks or months to get back to its normal speed. So clearly things are happening with these objects on much shorter time scales than we previously thought, and that might be related to how fast radio bursts are generated.”
However, despite these important observations, scientists are far from concluding what triggers the ‘fast radio bursts’. George Younes, a member of the NICER science team specialising in magnetars, said, “We’ve unquestionably observed something important for our understanding of fast radio bursts, but I think we still need a lot more data to complete the mystery.”
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