Mysterious 'fast radio burst' detected closer to Earth than ever before - Live Science

Thirty thousand years ago, a dead star on the other side of the Milky Way belched out a powerful mixture of radio and X-ray energy.

The signal was there and gone in half a second, but that's all scientists needed to confirm they had detected something remarkable: the first ever "fast radio burst" (FRB) to emanate from a known star within the Milky Way, according to a study published July 27 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The bursts of powerful radio waves last only a few milliseconds at most, but generate more energy in that time than Earth's sun does in a century.

"We've never seen a burst of radio waves, resembling a fast radio burst, from a magnetar before," lead study author Sandro Mereghetti, of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Milan, Italy, said in a statement.

"This is the first ever observational connection between magnetars and fast radio bursts.".

After quieting down for a while, the dead star woke up with a powerful X-ray blast in late April.

At the same time, a radio telescope in the mountains of British Columbia, Canada, detected a blast of radio waves coming from the same source.

A simultaneous blast of radio waves and X-rays has never been detected from a magnetar before, the researchers wrote, strongly pointing to these stellar remnants as plausible sources of FRBs. .