Radio Bursts from Stars Discovered to have Replicas

 

It seems that mysterious flashes of radio light in the Universe have a fascinating cause: they could come from dead stars that are having 'earthquakes' in a big way.

Picture this: Scientists have analyzed thousands of these flashes from three different sources and found something surprising. Instead of resembling solar flares, as previously thought, they are more like earthquakes that occur on Earth.

According to astronomers Tomonori Totani and Yuya Tsuzuki of the University of Tokyo, this similarity reinforces the idea that these massive explosions come from stellar 'earthquakes', probably on the surface of objects called magnetars.

Imagine this: these radio flashes are like incredibly powerful small explosions that last a fraction of a second, but in that time, they release a huge amount of energy, equivalent to that of 500 million suns! Most of them appear only once, making them very difficult to study and predict. This new discovery brings us a little closer to understanding these mysterious events that happen in the cosmos.

What an exciting development! In recent years, astronomers have managed to track and analyze some fast, repeating radio bursts, giving them the opportunity to study these signals in more detail. Plus, something really special happened in 2020: they found one of these bursts coming from our own galaxy, the Milky Way. This meant they were able to trace it back to the star that spawned it – an important milestone in our understanding of these cosmic phenomena!