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Our universe has batch of stellar graveyards — dead galaxies littered with the burnt corpses of once - brainy star . But one of these ancient galaxies come along to be crawling back out of the grave .
New research has found a stagnant galaxy air mysterious flash of sparkle — a behaviour that should be swallow well into its past . Thetwonewstudiesdescribing the disgraceful discovery were published Jan. 21 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters .
An artist’s rendering of a magnetar releasing a fast radio burst (FBR). A newly discovered repeating FRB seems to have come from a source unlike any other.
accord to the researchers , the perplexing flash is a character of cosmic eruption known as afast radio burst(FRB ) — momentaneous flares of wireless light that can outshine an integral coltsfoot for a couple of milliseconds before disappearing entirely . Some are one - off bursts , while others iterate at regular intervals . FRBs are thought to company supernova explosions , which announce the deaths of high - mass stars . So they ’re more potential to occur where stars imprint — in immature , lively galaxies with enough gas and rubble to fuel stellar parturition .
" Of the thousands of FRBs find to escort , only about a hundred have been pinpointed to their horde galaxies,“Tarraneh Eftekhari , a co - author of both new study and an stargazer at Northwestern University , told Live Science . " And those galaxies tend to have a lot of star formation , which imply more stars are travel supernova . "
But then , Eftekhari and her colleagues zeroed in on a novel repeating explosion , combining 22 signaling detect between February and November 2024 by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment ( CHIME ) , a wireless telescope array in British Columbia . The results hunt the bursts back to an unexpected culprit : the outskirt of an 11 billion - year - old dead galaxy that should have withdraw from sensation formation long ago . But that does n’t needfully mean it ’s sparking back to life .
" This observation from a very dead galaxy differentiate us that there postulate to be some other way of life for an FRB to be produced , " Eftekhari said . " This discovery go against the nicer video we ’ve had of FRBs so far . "
A cosmic “outlier”
According to canvas cobalt - authorVishwangi Shah , an astronomer at McGill University , FRBs also run to occur near the centre of Galax urceolata , making this burst from the galax ’s edge even more peculiar . " All of these surprises combined make this FRB an outlier among the larger universe , " Shah told Live Science .
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The team has some estimate of what might be behind the burst . One hypothesis is that two old stars may have collided . The other is that awhite dwarf — the shriveled remains of a bushed whizz — may have collapse on itself . Either way , the new discovery leaves much to be investigated about the nature of FRBs .
Within the coming months , more of CHIME ’s scope array will number online , with the end of adding one C of additional bursts to the FRB armory , Eftekhari said . " We ’ll be able to whizz in on the surroundings of tons more of these events and retrace them back to unlike type of galaxies , " she impart .
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