The 'deadly' truth about strange radio signals transmitted to Earth

A team of Chinese astrophysicists has come up with a "death" scenario for the source of strange radio bursts that have been plaguing observatories around the globe for years.

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are one of the most curious types of cosmic signals. For many years, observatories around the planet have continuously picked up many of these radio signals, with diverse properties: Some flash only once, some repeat periodically, some repeat irregularly.

Many hypotheses have been put forward about what emitted the radio flashes: black hole collisions, neutron star collisions (corpses of giant stars), sent by aliens.

An extremely powerful neutron star, a type known as a "magnet star" - (Graphic image from NASA).

In a study recently published in the scientific journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , Dr. Qin Wu and colleagues from the School of Astronomy and Space Science at Nanjing University (China) tracked such a signal from the galaxy SGR J1935+2154 .

The clues suggest a scenario no one had thought of before: A neutron star being attacked .

This "zombie" star , although only the size of a grapefruit to a city, possesses extremely strong energy, up to 1 million times the Earth's magnetic field.

New research shows that when an asteroid unexpectedly crashes into a neutron star, it can release a burst of radio waves. This extremely fast, powerful signal is caused by the monster star quickly tearing apart its attacker.

This helps explain why a radio burst of this type, although one of the most powerful events in the universe, only lasts a few thousandths of a second.

In 2020, a fairly certain origin of a radio burst emanating from within Earth's Milky Way galaxy suggested it might be a magnetar.

A magnetar is an advanced form of neutron star, much denser and more powerful than a regular neutron star, with a magnetic field that can be 4 million times stronger than Earth's. This magnetar suddenly malfunctioned and changed its rotation speed. Just a shudder of its rotation was enough to release a tremendous amount of energy, which was sent flying as a burst of radio waves that 'reverberated' all the way to Earth.