Radio Burst in Milky Way

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National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has spotted fast Radio Burst for the first time in the Milky Way.

What is an FRB?

The first FRB was discovered in 2007, since when scientists have been working towards finding the source of their origin.
Essentially, FRBs are bright bursts of radio waves (radio waves can be produced by astronomical objects with changing magnetic fields).
Its durations lie in the millisecond-scale, because of which it is difficult to detect them and determine their position in the sky.

What is a Fast Radio Burst (FRB)

The first FRB was discovered in 2007, since when scientists have been working towards finding the source of their origin.
Essentially, FRBs are bright bursts of radio waves (radio waves can be produced by astronomical objects with changing magnetic fields).
Its durations lie in the millisecond-scale, because of which it is difficult to detect them and determine their position in the sky.

Who discovered it?

The X-ray portion of the simultaneous bursts was detected by several satellites, including NASA’s Wind mission.
Further, a NASA-funded project called Survey for Transient Astronomical Radio Emission 2 (STARE2) also detected the radio burst.

Significant

First noticed in 2018 by the Canadian observatory the waves have created ripples across the globe for one reason — they arrive in a pattern.
This gave birth to theories that they could be from an alien civilization.
Initially, it was believed that the collision of black holes or neutron stars triggers them.
But the discovery of repeating FRBs debunked the theory of colliding objects.

Source of FRB in Milky Way

The source of the FRB detected recently in the Milky Way is a very powerful magnetic neutron star referred to as a magnetar, called SGR 1935+2154 or SGR 1935, which is located in the constellation Vulpecula and is estimated to be between 14,000-41,000 light-years away.
The FRB was part of one of the magnetar’s most prolific flare-ups, with the X-ray bursts lasting less than a second.
The radio burst, on the other hand, lasted for a thousandth of a second and was thousands of times brighter than any other radio emissions from magnetars seen in the Milky Way previously.
- This flare-up, which lasted for hours, was picked up by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space telescope and NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER).
- The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, formerly called the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), is a space observatory being used to perform gamma-ray astronomy observations from low Earth orbit.
- NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer is an International Space Station (ISS) payload devoted to the study of neutron stars through soft X-ray timing.

Magnetar

As per NASA, a magnetar is a neutron star, “the crushed, city-size remains of a star many times more massive than the Sun.”
The magnetic field of such a star is very powerful, which can be over 10 trillion times stronger than a refrigerator magnet and up to a thousand times stronger than a typical neutron star’s.
Magnetars are a subclass of these neutrons and occasionally release flares with more energy in a fraction of a second than the Sun is capable of emitting in tens of thousands of years.
In the case of SGR 1935, for instance, the X-ray portion of the simultaneous bursts it released recently carried as much energy as the Sun produces in a month, assuming that the magnetar lies towards the nearer end of its distance range.

Neutron

Neutron stars are formed when the core of a massive star undergoes gravitational collapse when it reaches the end of its life.
This results in the matter being so tightly packed that even a sugar-cube sized amount of material taken from such a star weighs more than 1 billion tons, which is about the same as the weight of Mount Everest, according to NASA.