With the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have discovered the origins of a series of fast radio bursts observed on Earth.
FRBs are powerful but quick, lasting less than a second but containing more energy than the Sun emits in a year.
Experts first identified FRBs in 2007. However, the mystery surrounding them has remained relatively unsolved since then. However, scholars have cataloged up to 1,000 of them in the years since.
The ferocity of the explosions has sparked debate on anything from extraterrestrial intelligence to unexplained physical phenomena.
IN SPACE - MAY 13: In this handout from NASA, the Hubble Space Telescope is grappled to Space Shuttle Atlantis STS-125 by the shuttle's Canadian-built remote manipulator system May 13, 2009, in Space. The space shuttle Atlantis' mission is to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope in order to extend its working life.
Flash in Spiral Galaxies
The cause of eight of those bursts was traced down to its precise position in the new report. Five of them were discovered inside spiral galaxies, strung out over their curvy tentacles.
The finding helps other scientists in the quest for the location of the explosions and the narrowing down of alternative hypotheses.
"We don't know what causes FRBs, so it's really important to use context when we have it," study co-author Wen-fai Fong said in a CNN report. "Because spiral arms are signs of stars being born, this was a surprise, offering a major clue that FRBs must correlate with star formation," Northwestern's Fong added.
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The new study, which included astronomers from various universities and used the Hubble Space Telescope, has been published for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. An early version of the study, titled "A High-Resolution View of Fast Radio Burst Host Environments," is available On ArXiv.org.
The study's lead author, Alexandra Mannings of the University of California, Santa Cruz, described the findings as "new and exciting." The research, according to Mannings, is the first to have a high-resolution view of a population of FRBs. Hubble shows five of them near or on the spiral arms of a galaxy, according to Manning.
Magnetic Monsters
The findings seem to rule out the possibility that the deaths of the youngest and most massive stars caused the explosions. It also seems that they are not the result of the merging of neutron stars, which are the shattered cores of stars that die in supernovae, since the galaxies in which they were discovered are too young for those stars to be located on spiral galaxy arms.
However, it supports the primary hypothesis that outbursts from young magnetars, or neutron stars with very strong magnetic fields, caused fast radio bursts.
"Owing to their strong magnetic fields, magnetars are quite unpredictable," Fong told Phys.org.
The researchers believed that the flares from a young magnetar caused the FRBs in this situation. Fong said Massive stars evolve into neutron stars, some of which can be highly magnetized, resulting in flares and magnetic processes on their surfaces that can release radio light. Our findings are consistent with this picture, ruling out either very young or very old progenitors as FRB progenitors.
It also contributes to the strengthening of the connection between FRBs and large star-forming galaxies. Previous studies have been unable to rule out the possibility that the blasts were originating from dwarf galaxies obscured by a more massive one, but the current analysis allowed researchers to rule out those dwarf galaxies.
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