Today’s science is largely radioed in from observatories around the world and starts with what appears to be the first identification of an object emitting a fast radio burst (FRB). 

First discovered in 2006, these fraction-of-a-second events bundle together the energy of three days’ worth of sunlight. They come in various styles, ranging from the random, single detection to recurring systems that exhibit periods of bursts and periods of quiet. It has been speculated that some kind of a compact object – a neutron star or black hole – could be the source of the bursts, but because they had always been detected in distant galaxies, these theories hadn’t been grounded in a lot of observations.

At least not until now.

On April 27, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory detected a storm of X-ray bursts associated with the SGR 1935+2154. This spinning neutron star is known to have a powerful magnetic field that releases X-ray and gamma-ray light in association with changes in its structure. Starquakes and other events that occur as this young neutron star settles into equilibrium can create storms that last for hours and even days.

The April 27 storm lasted for hours, with X-ray bursts that lasted less than a second being detected by Swift, Fermi, and NICER, but thirteen hours after it quieted, and while all these orbiting observatories were on the wrong side of the planet, SGR 1935+2154 let off a half-second long burst of incredible brightness that was caught by ESA’s INTEGRAL, Russia’s Konus, and China’s Huiyan missions. As the spacecraft detected this final massive X-ray burst, ground-based radio systems CHIME and STARE2 caught a single radio burst that, like an FRB, lasted just a thousandth of a second.

These results appear in a pair of papers in the journal Nature, and co-author Paul Scholz explains: The radio burst was far brighter than anything we had seen before, so we immediately knew it was an exciting event. We’ve studied magnetars in our galaxy for decades, while FRBs are an extragalactic phenomenon whose origins have been a mystery. This event shows that the two phenomena are likely connected.

The energy of SGR 1935+2154 is consistent with how weaker FRBs in other galaxies appear, and it is only because it is located not too far away in our galaxy that we were able to see so many details of its activity. If this was a local FRB, then we can expect that other FRBs also have associated X-ray activity that is simply waiting to be discovered. We now just need more magnetars in our galaxy and nearby galaxies to do their thing, and let us catch all their flickering and flaring across the electromagnetic spectrum.

More Information

NASA press release 

“A Bright Millisecond-Duration Radio Burst from a Galactic Magnetar,” CHIME/FRB Collaboration, 2020 Nov. 4, Nature

“A Fast Radio Burst Associated with a Galactic Magnetar,” C. D. Bochenek et al., 2020 Nov. 4, Nature