For the first time, scientists used James Webb’s Space Telescope (JWST) to study the origins of strange, record-breaking radio signals that flashed past Earth earlier this year.
Tracking bright radio bursts from Earth to the edge of a galaxy about 130 million light-years, researchers used JWST’s infrared to identify powerful explosions of energy generated from large old stars that could be progenitor cells of strange signals. The team also zoomed in on specific stars clustered nearby, drawing pictures of the original environment of the Radio Burst with unprecedented clarity.
Findings explained in two papers published on August 21 in Astrophysical Journal Letters could mark a turning point in high-speed wireless burst (FRB) studies.
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“The high resolution of JWST allows us to resolve individual stars around the Fed for the first time,” said Peter Blanchard, a research scientist at Harvard University and a lead author of one of the papers. “This opens the door to identify the types of stellar environments that could cause such a powerful burst, especially when the unusual Fed is captured at this level of detail.”
New possibilities for “floating”
True to their name, the fast radio burst is a very short pulse of wireless energy. They often last for a few milliseconds, but at that point they emit more power than within a few days.
Since the discovery of the phenomenon in 2007, scientists have detected over 1,000 Feds blowing outwards from every corner of the sky. However, the ultra-trace duration of the pulse makes it difficult to study. Many of the strange signals seem to be repeated, but some are not. There are several theories about the cause of the Fed, and the main competitor is magnets. It is the fast, highly magnetized shell of a dead star called a neutron star. But this is also uncertain.
In March, astronomers at the Canadian Hydrogen Strength Mapping Experiment (CHIME) – an array of over 1,000 radio receivers dedicated to Fed research – found the brightest radio burst ever detected at the facility. Officially named FRB 20250316A, the team is called the powerful burst “RBFloat” and stands for the greatest Radio Bright Flash of all time.
Related: A fast radio burst traced to the outskirts of an ancient “cemetery” galaxy – and the cause remains a mystery
The extreme brightness of the Burst suggests that the Fed was born relatively close to the Milky Way, making it the perfect target for Chime’s new outrigger array, a suite of telescopes spanning North America, from California to British Columbia. Researching the powerful Fed from multiple vantage points, researchers fixed its position to the Galaxy NGC 4141 inside a large dipper, further narrowing the origin of the burst into an area of the universe, measuring 45 light years. (For comparison, our Milky Way galaxy spans approximately 100,000 light years).
“The accuracy of this localization is like finding a quarter from 100km. [62 miles] Apart from the McGill University postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the second paper, Amanda Cook, said in a statement.
Following Chime’s first detective work, the team has taken the help of a powerful JWST. Not only did the telescope detect bursts of infrared energy at the exact location where the Fed was detected, but also looked at individual stars in the surrounding neighborhoods to characterize the environment in which the radio was emitted.
“This could be the first object linked to the Fed that anyone found in another galaxy,” Blanchard said in a separate statement.
Data from JWST showed that infrared objects were giant red stars (stars that bulge as they approach the end of life) or middle-aged stars that were multiple times larger than the sun. While neither type of stars is a viable source for the Fed, it is plausible for invisible companion stars, such as energy-spinning neutron stars, to orbit infrared objects, the team added. In that case, the companion star could have sucked up the material from the larger host, and could have triggered a bright radio burst.
By studying the younger but Mackis star-filled surrounding environment, the team also proposed a second hypothesis. One of the larger stars in the cluster has already collapsed into a magnet, and could have easily released the FRB, but it’s too faint to see directly as JWST.
“Whether our relationship with the stars is authentic or not, we learned a lot about the origins of Burst,” Blanchard said. “If the double star system is not the answer, our work suggests that isolated magnets have caused the Fed.”
Putting aside rbfloat, this study shows that newly upgraded chime experiments can localize elusive FRBs with unprecedented accuracy. Tracking the Fed further to its origins will not only help solve one of astrophysics’ biggest standout mysteries, but it can shed new light on the dynamics of the stars, revealing how different stars behave in their bright but noisy lives.
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