Mark Megahan
There was a whole lot of hopeful speculation that the signal was a message from space aliens. When the first “fast radio bursts” were detected, in 2007, SETI enthusiasts were howling with joy. Astronomers at MIT just sent them back to keep looking. Extraterrestrial life isn’t the source of the mysterious cosmic events. That doesn’t mean the natural cause isn’t an interesting one. Anything to do with magnetars is interesting.
Alien radio signal
The scientists still don’t have all the answers but they’ve recently become convinced that fast radio bursts aren’t an alien radio signal.
Astronomers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology made what industry insiders are calling a “breakthrough.” The “intense bursts of radio waves lasting only a few milliseconds” had them all baffled for years.
Since 2007, “thousands of FRBs have been detected.” Some of them come from inside our own Milky Way galaxy. Others have been picked up originating “as far as 8 billion light-years away.” Or so it seems.
There’s another new theory out that might debunk that. Time bubbles expand a whole lot quicker than local space, thanks to the presence of matter. No matter how far away the signal comes from, the exact cause is still “unclear.”
MIT researchers recently published their findings in Nature. They focused on just one fast radio burst signal, FRB 20221022A. They managed to pinpoint its source. They calculate that “this burst was detected from a galaxy located approximately 200 million light-years away.”
More specifically, “their findings suggest that the burst likely originated within 10,000 kilometers of a neutron star’s surface.” That puts it in “a region called the magnetosphere.”
Precise targeting
The team at MIT was patting themselves on the back simply for getting the measurement. Tracing the signal was nearly impossible but they managed to do it.
“Zooming in to a 10,000-kilometer region, from a distance of 200 million light years,” they say, “is like being able to measure the width of a DNA helix, which is about 2 nanometers wide, on the surface of the moon.” As associate physics professor Kiyoshi Masui relates, “There’s an amazing range of scales involved.”
Lead researcher Kenzie Nimmo was excited to explain how detecting the signal origin where they found it opens other possibilities for further research. They know that “the magnetic fields near neutron stars are extraordinarily intense, to the point where atoms cannot exist because they would be torn apart.”
Their findings add “strong evidence to the idea that FRBs can come from magnetars.” Those are “a type of neutron star with an incredibly chaotic and magnetic environment.”
He’s so excited by their findings that they’ve just been banned in 17 states. “The exciting thing here is, we find that the energy stored in those magnetic fields, close to the source, is twisting and reconfiguring such that it can be released as radio waves that we can see halfway across the universe.”
It’s the radio astronomy version of pulling in an AM radio signal from half way around the planet. It can be done but it’s really tricky and you have to listen close while twiddling the knob.
