NASA telescopes capture extreme radio events in space

In an ejection that would have caused its rotation to slow, an exploded star — or magnetar — is shown losing material into space in this artist’s concept. The magnetar’s strong, twisted magnetic field lines (shown in green) can influence the flow of electrically charged material from the object, which is a type of neutron star. Illustration

Feb. 14 (UPI) — NASA scientists could be closer to understanding extreme radio events in space, after two of the space agency’s X-ray telescopes captured a dead star releasing a fast burst of radio waves.

The radio burst lasted only for a fraction of a second and released as much energy as the sun does in a year, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The brief, bright light from the dead star formed a laserlike beam, rather than producing a more chaotic cosmic explosion.

Before NASA’s initial observation, scientists often were unable to determine where the radio waves came from because they are extremely brief and often originate outside of our own galaxy. But the collapsed remains of an exploded star, called a magnetar, produced a brief, bright radio burst within Earth’s home galaxy in 2020.

A second fast radio burst, from the same magnetar, occurred in October 2022. NASA’s two telescopes, NICER — or Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer — on the International Space Station, and NuSTAR — or Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array — in low Earth orbit, captured the brief events.

“We’ve unquestionably observed something important for our understanding of fast radio bursts,” said George Younes, a researcher at Goddard and a member of the NICER science team specializing in magnetars.

Scientists say the latest burst occurred between what they called two “glitches,” which is when a magnetar suddenly starts spinning faster. The magnetar is estimated to be about 12 miles across and was spinning about 3.2 times a second, which means it was moving at about 7,000 mph.

Given the speed, scientists said they were surprised to see the magnetar slow down to less than its pre-glitch speed in just nine hours.

“Typically, when glitches happen, it takes the magnetar weeks or months to get back to its normal speed,” said Chin-Ping Hu, lead author of the study and astrophysicist at National Changhua University of Education in Taiwan.

“So clearly things are happening with these objects on much shorter time scales than we previously thought, and that might be related to how fast radio bursts are generated.”

As scientists dive into the variables as to what caused the fast radio bursts, Younes admitted there is still a lot of research to be done.

“I think we still need a lot more data to complete the mystery.”