The Westerbork synthetic telescope manages to connect the FRB to young neutron stars.
© Van Leeuwen / Astron
Using the Westerbork radio network, a team of astronomers has just resolved the great mystery of FRB, two decades, connecting them to very young dead and strongly magnetic stars: neutron stars.
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The Westerbork radio network in the Netherlands.
© Wikipedia
What are the fast radio Burst?
In 2007, the US astronomer Duncan Lorimer discovered that the so -called Magellan cloud galaxy was crossed by an ultra brief and powerful energy flash, of a nature absolutely unknown. It even seems to come from 3 billion light years further than the small galaxy close to ours. It was at the time of the first Fast Radio Burst (Rapid Radio in French) known. A typical FRB lasts about 1 millisecond and concentrates more energy than all the production of the sun for a whole month. In summary, it’s both violent and in short!
These FRBs were all the more intriguing than at the time, there was absolutely no idea of their cause and everything was imagined. Why not messages from a highly developed extraterrestrial civilization? The SETI, North American Institute-very serious-responsible for tracking down any form of cosmic intelligence, got involved. After the discovery of dozens of other signals from all directions, this hypothesis vanishes.
Dozens of FRB are found from all directions
FRB 150418 detected in a giant elliptical galaxy. On the right, radio peak detected by the Parkes telescope.
© That-Se-Passe-l’A Haut
The quest for FRB was amplified in particular in the middle of the decade 2010, astrophysicists being excited at the idea of potentially discovering a new type of star, perhaps even more bizarre than a black hole. It was the time when we started to find it everywhere around us in the universe.
Two years of observations and the survey finds its solution
Inés Pastor-Marazuela (astron), the main author of the study published in Astronomy & Astrophysicsexplain : “We were able to study these gusts with an incredible level of detail. We note that their shape is very similar to what we see in young neutron stars […] The way in which the radio flashes were produced, then modified when they have traveled space over billions of years, is also in accordance with an origin of neutron star, making the conclusion even stronger. ”
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