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MIT scientists pin down the origins of a fast radio burst
MIT astronomers pinned down the origins of at least one fast radio burst, a brief and brilliant explosion of radio waves emitted by an extremely compact object. The team’s novel technique might also reveal the sources of other FRBs.
The team’s findings provide the first conclusive evidence that a fast radio burst can originate from the magnetosphere, the highly magnetic environment immediately surrounding an extremely compact object. “In these environments of neutron stars, the magnetic fields are really at the limits of what the universe can produce,” says lead author Kenzie Nimmo, a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. To distinguish between the two scenarios, and determine where fast radio bursts arise, the team considered scintillation — the effect that occurs when light from a small bright source such as a star, filters through some medium, such as a galaxy’s gas.
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