The mystery of fast radio bursts: another piece to the puzzle that doesn’t quite fit

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25250/thescbr.brk703

Keywords:

fast radio bursts, transients, radio astronomy, interferometry, magnetars

Abstract

Fast radio bursts are millisecond-duration, extremely bright flashes of radio light that reach us from other galaxies. We do not know what they are but compelling evidence suggests that they are generated by young stars called magnetars. We found such an object in a globular cluster, an environment where one would absolutely not expect a magnetar. How did this fast radio burst get there?

 

Author Biography

Franz Kirsten, ASTRON

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Original article reference

Kirsten, F., Marcote, B., Nimmo, K., Hessels, J. W. T., Bhardwaj, M., Tendulkar, S. P., Keimpema, A., Yang, J., Snelders, M. P., Scholz, P., Pearlman, A. B., Law, C. J., Peters, W. M., Giroletti, M., Paragi, Z., Bassa, C., Hewitt, D. M., Bach, U., Bezrukovs, V., … Vlemmings, W. (2022). A repeating fast radio burst source in a globular cluster. Nature, 602(7898), 585–589. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04354-w

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Published

2023-05-17

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 2 (2023): TheScienceBreaker

Section

Earth & Space

License

Some rights reserved 2023 Franz Kirsten

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.