What are these mysterious signals picked up in a galaxy far, far away ?

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Scientists from Northwestern University and McGill University have just published two joint studies on fast radio bursts (FRBs). These signals, known since the mid-2000s, are generally attributed to magnetars, a type of neutron star with a very powerful magnetic field.

But in this new observation, Tarraneh Eftekhari, who participated in both studies, assures that this explanation does not hold water. As we said above, FRBs come from magnetars, the latter being the result of a supernova (the explosion of a giant star).

A very mysterious FRB

However, in the vicinity of this new FRB, scientists have not discovered any young stars that could transform into magnetars. A discovery that suggests that the origin of FRBs may be larger than expected. This new signal comes from a very old galaxy located 2 billion light-years away from us.

Another surprising discovery for scientists is that the signal does not seem to come from the center of the galaxy, as is usually the case. The FRB was located 130,000 light-years away from the latter. For Vishwangi Shah, this discovery raises many questions, particularly about the origin of FRBs and “how such events can occur in regions where no new stars are forming”.

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Globular clusters, a new source of FRBs

Faced with this new scientific challenge, the professor suggests that FRBs could come from a star cluster. For now, no one knows if a globular cluster is located at the position of this FRB, but the researcher has asked JPL (a subsidiary of NASA) for permission to use the James Webb Space Telescope to monitor this particular region of the sky.

If she ends up discovering a globular cluster, it would be the second time that a FRB has been discovered within a star cluster. But if this is not the case, it will be necessary to find “other exotic scenarios” for the origin of FRBs. Although these signals are still poorly understood by the scientific world, the teams at the Arecibo Observatory estimate that FRBs are quite common in space, with more than 10,000 emissions every day.

While waiting to understand the origin of FRBs, scientists around the world continue to study this phenomenon assiduously. Research into them could, among other things, allow us to calculate the mass of baryonic matter (the one that interacts with us) present in the Universe. A first study published in 2020 on this subject gave very encouraging results.

During the same year, a first fast radio burst was discovered within the Milky Way, confirming the banality of this phenomenon in the Universe.

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