Radio wave bursts in space can come from the cores of...

Astronomers have seen a handful of extremely intense and short radio waves since 2007, but have yet to determine exactly what creates them. The explosions have sparked all sorts of speculations about their origins, from exploding or colliding stars to alien civilizations.

Now the speculation could soon be resolved, and three teams of scientists are finally finding a clear and plausible source for the enigmatic impulses known as “rapid bursts” or FRBs. Using different telescopes, teams in the United States, Canada, and China independently examined an FRB that was 30,000 light-years away and lasted just a millisecond from April onwards, and all three came to the same conclusion: It probably came from a magnetar in our own galaxy.

A magnetar is the rotating core of a massive dead star with a strong magnetic field. According to Christopher Bochenek, Caltech astronomer and lead author of the US-based research, magnetars are so dense that a teaspoon would weigh from one to 1,000 pyramids at Giza. The researchers published their results on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“This discovery makes it plausible that most of the fast radio bursts emanate from magnetars,” said Bochenek. The radio burst they were studying was a thousand times stronger than anything else in the Milky Way, he said.

So far, astronomers have struggled to explain why some FRBs are not one-time events like supernova explosions, but instead appear to repeat themselves. Magnetars might provide the answer as they spin slowly and flicker regularly, like a lighthouse. They are abundant both inside and outside of our galaxy to be the sources of other outbreaks that scientists have seen.

Bochenek and his team studied the FRB using a network of small radio antennas called STARE2, distributed across California and Utah, to identify the locations of bursts and differentiate them from radio signals generated by humans on Earth. Canadian astronomers using the massive CHIME telescope in British Columbia also attributed the FRB to a magnetar, and a Chinese collaboration had consistent results with their own radio telescope.

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