Recent discoveries can help shed light on the origin of mysterious and bright radiation, often coming from the depths of space. A group of researchers suggests that the surge of radio waves from the depths of the cosmos came from the plasma bubble surrounding the compact object – one of the dense entities of the Universe.
These waves turned out to be a quick radio support (FRB) – a mysterious class of radio waves, characterized by its brightness and unpredictable duration. Many of them are short-term, but some demonstrate amazing regularity; One of these outbreaks described by the other team of researchers last year was a blink of every 23 years.
Astronomers found a surge called FRB20201124A in 2020, emanating from a source at a distance of about 1.3 billion light years. Last year, another team of researchers found the farthest FRB, which is emanating from a source at a distance of about 10 billion light years. Thus, the recently analyzed surge seems relative. This week in the journal Nature a study describing the nature of its origin.
“We were able to demonstrate with the help of observations that the constant radiation observed along with some fast radio surges behaves as expected from the model of foggy radiation, that is, the ‘bubble’ of ionized gas surrounding the central engine,” said Gabriel Bruni Gabriel, researcher from the National Institute of Astrophysics and the leading author of the new article, in the press release of Inaf.
Fast radio caps are flashes of radio waves that generate “as much energy in a thousandth of a second as the sun produces in a year,” according to NASA. They are really bright, which makes them exciting data sources for radio -safeons. FRB20201124A was studied using the most sensitive radio telescope on Earth, a very large array. The team found that the FRB comes from the plasma bubble surrounding the dense object.
What dense object can be the center of this bubble? There are several possibilities, but they are all extremely dense. New data suggest that in its center there may be a magnet – a strongly magnetized