"This detection raises the question of what could cause this extreme signal that we've never seen before and how can we use this signal to study the universe," Michilli said.
Doing so would help the team investigate what might be causing the pulses and learn more about the unexpected behaviors of neutron stars. To learn more about the bursts and their mysterious source, the researchers are now preparing to hopefully catch additional pulses from FRB 20191221A. From the properties of this new signal, we can say that around this source, there's a cloud of plasma that must be extremely turbulent."
"We've seen some that live inside clouds that are very turbulent, while others look like they're in clean environments. "CHIME has now detected many FRBs with different properties," Michilli said. They aren't sure what could be behind this intense luminosity, but they proposed that it could be caused by a source that is usually not as bright but, for some unknown reason, fired off a succession of brilliant bursts that CHIME happened to catch. Sorry folks: 'Alien' signal from Proxima Centauri was likely just a broken computer on Earth Ultrahot, ultrafast explosion called 'the Camel' has astronomers puzzled But there was one key difference: FRB 20191221A seems to be a million times brighter, according to the scientists. This is the first time the signal itself is periodic."Īfter analyzing the pattern produced by the signal's radio bursts, the researchers found that its emissions closely matched those seen from radio pulsars and magnetars spotted in our own galaxy. "Not only was it very long, lasting about 3 seconds, but there were periodic peaks that were remarkably precise, emitting every fraction of a second - boom, boom, boom - like a heartbeat. 21, 2019, while scanning the skies for distant hydrogen radio emissions, CHIME picked up the strange signal. The astronomers first spotted the new signal using the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), a radio telescope designed to spot radio waves emitted by hydrogen at one of the earliest stages of the universe - when mysterious, hypothetical dark energy first caused the universe to begin expanding at an accelerating rate. And we think this new signal could be a magnetar or pulsar on steroids."
"Examples that we know of in our own galaxy are radio pulsars and magnetars, which rotate and produce a beamed emission similar to a lighthouse. "There are not many things in the universe that emit strictly periodic signals," study co-author Daniele Michilli, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a statement. While most FRBs are one-time events, some repeat - sometimes in a single brief burst and other times across multiple periods. But scientists aren't sure that all FRBs come from magnetars.
Pulsars and magnetars have unusually strong magnetic fields that are often millions or trillions of times more powerful than Earth's, and as they spin rapidly in space, they sweep out a beam of intense electromagnetic radiation from their poles, like giant lighthouses. Magnetars, and their less magnetized cousins pulsars, are special types of neutron stars, which are ultradense stellar corpses left behind from the explosive deaths of stars. In 2020, the first-ever detection of an FRB within our own Milky Way galaxy enabled scientists to trace the FRB's origins to a magnetar, a highly magnetized, fast-rotating husk of a dead star.
0 kommentar(er)
