Japanese scientists have discovered a “chilling” explanation for fast radio bursts (FRBs), a type of short, powerful signal that Earth-based observatories constantly detect.
A research team led by astronomers Tomonori Totani and Yuya Tsuzuki from the University of Tokyo indicates that fast radio bursts could originate from seismic activities on magnetars.
According to Sci-News, the authors decided to calculate the correlation between the fast radio bursts detected by Earth-based instruments in two-dimensional space, analyzing the time and energy emissions of nearly 7,000 pulses from three different repeating fast radio burst sources.
The CHIME radio telescope located at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in British Columbia, Canada, is one of the facilities that regularly detects fast radio bursts – (Photo: PHYS.ORG).
They then examined the correlation of this phenomenon with the energy-time data of earthquakes occurring on Earth and solar flares erupting from the surface of the Sun.
The results showed a strange similarity between fast radio bursts and earthquake data. In fact, fast radio bursts even exhibit “aftershocks.”
This led the authors to conclude that fast radio bursts are likely emissions from seismic activities on magnetars.
Since magnetars are a type of celestial body with extraordinarily powerful energy, the impact of these seismic activities is not limited to a cosmic scale but creates ripples that spread across intergalactic space.
Magnetars are one of the most powerful forms of neutron stars, which are the remnants of massive stars.
With magnetic fields approximately 1,000 times stronger than those of ordinary neutron stars, a previous study in Spain even calculated that a magnetar could release energy potent enough to be a billion times that of the Sun.
Thus, it is quite reasonable for them to emit powerful signals like fast radio bursts during seismic events.
The argument presented in a study recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society offers a plausible new explanation for fast radio bursts, although it is not yet a definitive statement, as no one has been able to directly observe an object producing fast radio bursts.
Identified for the first time in 2007, fast radio bursts are among the most controversial and speculated cosmic signals.
Many theories suggest that they are the result of black hole mergers, neutron stars, and there are even hypotheses proposing that they may be high-tech signals from an extraterrestrial civilization.
