After more than a decade of detective work, astronomers have found the best evidence yet for what’s causing fast radio bursts, or FRBs. These strange blasts of radio waves, which last just milliseconds, have become one of the most exciting mysteries in astronomy. And, in the end, it appears the prime suspect simply turned itself in.
Magnetars, short for “magnetic stars,” are the highly magnetic remnants of massive dead stars. Astronomers had long suspected these enigmatic beasts could be the source of FRBs. However, there’s only a handful of magnetars known in our Milky Way galaxy, and they all seemed too tame to be causing these extreme signals.
Then, in late April, a magnetar dubbed SGR 1935+2154 started blasting out X-rays near the center of our galaxy, some 30,000 light-years away. As the buzz about this object built, astronomers turned their ground and space-based telescopes in its direction just in time to catch X-rays, gamma rays — and eventually, the blast of a fast radio burst.
The discovery was detailed in a series of three papers published in the journal Nature on November 4.
It was the first FRB ever observed in our home galaxy, as well as the first FRB accompanied by other kinds of detectable radiation. Most importantly, it’s also the first FRB clearly associated with a single object.
