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Our universe has a lot of outstanding graveyards– dead galaxies cluttered with the charred remains of once-brilliant stars. One of these ancient galaxies appears to be crawling back out of the tomb.
New research study has actually discovered a dead galaxy beaming mystical flashes of light– a habits that must be buried well into its past. The 2 brand-new research studies explaining the stunning discovery were released Jan. 21 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
According to the scientists, the bewildering flash is a kind of cosmic eruption referred to as a quick radio burst (FRB)– short lived flares of radio light that can beat a whole galaxy for a number of milliseconds before vanishing completely. Some are one-off bursts, while others repeat at routine periods. FRBs are believed to accompany supernova surges, which reveal the deaths of high-mass stars. They’re more most likely to take place where stars form– in young, dynamic galaxies with sufficient gas and dust to sustain excellent births.
“Of the thousands of FRBs discovered to date, only about a hundred have been pinpointed to their host galaxies,” Tarraneh Eftekharia co-author of both brand-new research studies and an astronomer at Northwestern University, informed Live Science. “And those galaxies tend to have a lot of star formation, which means more stars are going supernova.”
Then, Eftekhari and her associates zeroed in on a brand-new duplicating burst, integrating 22 signals found in between February and November 2024 by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), a radio telescope selection in British Columbia. The outcomes trace the bursts back to an unanticipated offender: the borders of an 11 billion-year-old dead galaxy that must have retired from star development long earlier. That does not always indicate it’s triggering back to life.
“This observation from a very dead galaxy tells us that there needs to be some other way for an FRB to be produced,” Eftekhari stated. “This discovery goes against the nicer picture we’ve had of FRBs so far.”
A cosmic “outlier”
According to study co-author Vishwangi Shahan astronomer at McGill University, FRBs likewise tend to take place near the centers of galaxies, making this burst from the galaxy’s edge much more strange. “All of these surprises combined make this FRB an outlier among the larger population,” Shah informed Live Science.
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The group has some concepts of what may be behind the burst. One possibility is that 2 old stars might have clashed. The other is that a white dwarf — the shriveled remains of a dead star– might have collapsed on itself. In either case, the brand-new discovery leaves much to be examined about the nature of FRBs.
Within the coming months, more of CHIME’s telescope selection will come online, with the objective of including numerous extra bursts to the FRB stock, Eftekhari stated. “We’ll be able to zoom in on the environments of tons more of these events and trace them back to different types of galaxies,” she included.
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