Astronomers Astonished: Enigmatic Distant Radio Bursts Appear to be Neutron Stars
Using the radio telescope at Westerbork, The Netherlands, astronomers have discovered two dozen of the unexplained Fast Radio Bursts. After zooming in on the signal of the distant bursts, the astronomers found a striking similarity to the radio flashes emitted by nearby, known neutron stars. The distant stars that emit the Fast Radio Bursts must somehow generate an astounding one billion times more energy than the nearby ones.
A few years ago, astronomers discovered that the Universe is continuously being pierced by short but very bright flashes of radio light. These so-called Fast Radio Bursts, or FRBs, last only about 1 millisecond, but in that short time, they produce more energy than Sun creates in a month. Up until now, the record holders of power generation were neutron stars, the remnants of exploded stars in the Milky Way. The newly-found FRBs, however, shine a billion times more radiantly than neutron stars. That is so bright that they reach Earth from the distant Universe, far outside our Milky Way, after travelling up to a mind-blowing one billion light years.
After more than two years of observation, The Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT) discovered 24 new FRBs, according to a study that appeared on 23 January 2025. Its lead author, Inés Pastor-Marazuela (ASTRON and UvA) explains: “We were able to study these bursts in an incredible level of detail. We find that their shape is very similar to what we see in young neutron stars”. The other characteristics of the mysterious bursts point in the same direction, says Pastor-Marazuela, currently an NWO Rubicon Fellow at University of Manchester.
The astronomers were able to zoom in so deeply on the signals because the WSRT was upgraded with an experimental supercomputer, called ARTS, the Apertif Radio Transient System, specifically for studying FRBs. “We generally do not know when or where the next FRB will appear,” says research leader Joeri van Leeuwen (ASTRON), “so we have a vast computer constantly crunch through all radio signals from the sky.” To be able to keep up with the vast amount of data, advanced software was created specifically for ARTS by the Netherlands eScience Center. Leon Oostrum, research software engineer at the eScience Center, explains: “The new software automatically optimizes itself for the hardware available in ARTS, running on its extremely fast graphics cards. This made it fast enough to handle the large amount of data.” The astronomers then taught ARTS to look for bursts that are very short, very bright, and from very far away, because they expected those flashes to be the most extreme and interesting. When the supercomputer finds such bursts, it informs the astronomers. Van Leeuwen: “After a while the resemblance with the flashes we know from highly magnetic neutron stars started to emerge, and we were very excited that we lifted part of the veil around these perplexing bursts.”
“We were just starting to think we were getting close to understanding how regular neutron stars can shine so exceedingly bright in radio”, says van Leeuwen. “But then the Universe comes along and makes the puzzle one billion times harder. That’s just great”. Even with this new enigma emerging, the team is excited that they have been able solve the riddle of the nature of FRBs, by now linking them to young neutron stars.
Paper:
Comprehensive analysis of the Apertif Fast Radio Burst sample: similarities with young energetic neutron stars.
Inés Pastor-Marazuela, Joeri van Leeuwen, and the ARTS Team
Astronomy & Astrophysics, 23 January 2025, Open Access:
https://www.aanda.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202450953
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