If the same burst had come from another galaxy, its signature would have been indistinguishable from a typical FRB. The discovery of a short and formidable radio burst from a galactic magnetar called SGR 1935+2154 was exactly what researchers had been missing. But the few dozen known magnetars in our galaxy had never been observed to produce eruptions that might resemble the phenomena. Magnetars were already a leading candidate for the source of FRBs. A magnetar's magnetic field can be so strong that approaching within 1,000 kilometers of one would disrupt your body's atomic nuclei and electrons, causing you to effectively dissolve. Magnetars are an extreme kind of neutron star, a city-sized remnant left behind when a massive star dies in a supernova. In April 2020 three separate research teams detected an enormous blast of radio energy coming from a magnetar located in the Milky Way. Meanwhile scientists have learned that the bright light of an FRB carries within it a record of the contents of the intergalactic depths it traversed along its way to Earth, providing information about galaxies and the material between them that no other mechanism can. A torrent of new detections and deeper studies have elevated certain models of their inner workings while eliminating others, and several upcoming projects should help further narrow the possibilities. The study of FRBs is now at an inflection point. “But as we've been going on this quest, new discoveries have led to new questions.” “I think we're closer to understanding what some FRBs are,” says Ziggy Pleunis, an astrophysicist at the University of Toronto. Although much about FRBs remains unknown, in just the past year a clearer picture has started to emerge. Today researchers know that these explosions happen at least 800 times a day all over the sky, and they are one of the most active topics in astrophysics. According to one of those scientists, astrophysicist Duncan Lorimer of West Virginia University, the burst produced as much energy in a few thousandths of a second as the sun does in a month. Records of the powerful flare sat unseen for more than half a decade until a group of scientists sifting through archival data spotted the eruption-a so-called fast radio burst (FRB). Nobody noticed when an Australian radio telescope captured a fleeting explosion coming from far beyond the Milky Way in 2001.
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