Radio Burst in Milky Way

In News

• 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.