Radio Burst and its significance

  • The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) spotted fast Radio Burst for the first time in the Milky Way.

FAST RADIO BURST (FRB)

  • FRB was first discovered in 2007.
  • FRB are bright bursts of radio waves whose durations lie in the millisecond-scale.
  • This is the reason of it being difficult to detect them and determine their position in the sky.
  • Radio waves can be produced by astronomical objects with changing magnetic fields.
THE CURRENT OBSERVATION 
  • NASA observed a mix of X-ray and radio signals never observed before in the Milky Way.
  • The X-ray portion of the simultaneous bursts was detected by several satellites, including NASA’s Wind mission.
  • NASA’s Wind is a spin stabilized spacecraft launched on 1st November, 1994.
  • The radio component was discovered by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME).
CHIME
  • CHIME is a radio telescope located at Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in British Columbia.
  • It is led by McGill University in Montreal, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Toronto.
  • CHIME is a novel radio telescope that has no moving parts. 
  • Originally conceived to map the most abundant element in the universe - hydrogen - over a good fraction of the observable universe, this unusual telescope is optimized to have a high "mapping speed".
MAGNETAR
  • The source of the FRB detected recently in the Milky Way was a very powerful magnetic neutron star referred to as a magnetar, called SGR 1935+2154 or SGR 1935.
  • It is located in the constellation Vulpecula and is estimated to be between 14,000-41,000 light-years away.
  • As per NASA, a magnetar is a neutron star, “the crushed, city-size remains of a star many times more massive than the Sun.”
  • The FRB was part of one of the magnetar’s most prolific flare-ups, with the X-ray bursts lasting less than a second.
  • The radio burst, on the other hand, lasted for a thousandth of a second.
  • It was thousands of times brighter than any other radio emissions from magnetars seen in the Milky Way previously.
  • It is possible that the FRB-associated burst was exceptional because it likely occurred at or close to the magnetar’s magnetic pole.
THE TELESCOPE
  • This flare-up, which lasted for hours, was picked up by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space telescope and NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER).
  • The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, formerly called the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), is a space observatory being used to perform gamma-ray astronomy observations from low Earth orbit.
  • NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) is an International Space Station (ISS) payload devoted to the study of neutron stars through soft X-ray timing.

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