A group of astronomers spotted a short, powerful blast of radio waves coming from outer space and then successfully found where it was coming from: a powerful object within our own galaxy. It’s the first time scientists have been able to pinpoint these mysterious radio waves coming from inside the Milky Way, making them the closest of their kind that we’ve ever seen.
The radio waves known as fast radio bursts seem to have sprouted from an incredibly powerful “zombie” star in our galaxy. Called a neutron star, the object is a super dense leftover that forms when a massive star, bigger than our own Sun, collapses in on itself. But this neutron star is what’s known as a magnetar. It hosts an incredibly powerful magnetic field that stores mind-boggling amounts of energy, capable of distorting the shapes of atoms.
The magnetar is located just 30,000 light-years away . And it points to a solid connection between magnetars and these dynamic space radio waves. “This is the missing link,” scientists. “Now we’ve seen a fast radio burst coming from a magnetar, so it proves that at least some fraction of fast radio bursts we see in the universe come from magnetars.” “We still don’t really know exactly how lucky we got,” they says. “This could be like a once in five year thing. Or there could be a few of these things that happen every year. But with more events, we would be able to tell exactly how lucky we… were.”
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