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Our creation has plenty of stellar burial site — dead galaxies littered with the burnt remains of once - brilliant star . But one of these ancient galaxies appear to be crawling back out of the grave .
New enquiry has discover a dead galaxy beaming mysterious flashes of luminance — a behavior that should be buried well into its past . Thetwonewstudiesdescribing the shocking discovery were print Jan. 21 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters .
An artist’s rendering of a magnetar releasing a fast radio burst (FBR). A newly discovered repeating FRB seems to have come from a source unlike any other.
According to the researchers , the perplexing flash is a type of cosmic eruption known as afast radio receiver burst(FRB ) — momentaneous flares of radio light that can outshine an entire beetleweed for a couple of millisecond before disappear completely . Some are one - off bursts , while others recur at regular interval . FRBs are recall to accompany supernova explosions , which announce the deaths of eminent - slew mavin . So they ’re more likely to happen where star form — in unseasoned , lively galaxies with enough petrol and dust to fuel stellar births .
" Of the thousands of FRBs discovered to date , only about a hundred have been pinpointed to their host galaxies,“Tarraneh Eftekhari , a Centennial State - author of both new studies and an astronomer at Northwestern University , told Live Science . " And those coltsfoot run to have a lot of star shaping , which means more lead are conk out supernova . "
But then , Eftekhari and her colleagues zero in in on a new repetition fusillade , combining 22 sign detected between February and November 2024 by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment ( CHIME ) , a radio telescope regalia in British Columbia . The result retrace the bursts back to an unexpected perpetrator : the outskirts of an 11 billion - yr - old dead Galax urceolata that should have retire from maven geological formation long ago . But that does n’t needs mean it ’s sparking back to life .
" This observation from a very stagnant galaxy enjoin us that there call for to be some other direction for an FRB to be produced , " Eftekhari said . " This breakthrough goes against the prissy picture we ’ve had of FRBs so far . "
A cosmic “outlier”
According to canvass co - authorVishwangi Shah , an astronomer at McGill University , FRBs also run to come about near the shopping center of coltsfoot , stimulate this burst from the galaxy ’s bound even more peculiar . " All of these surprises combined make this FRB an outlier among the large universe , " Shah severalize Live Science .
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The team has some ideas of what might be behind the salvo . One possibility is that two older stars may have collide . The other is that awhite dwarf — the shrivel clay of a dead star — may have collapsed on itself . Either way , the young breakthrough go forth much to be investigated about the nature of FRBs .
Within the forthcoming month , more of CHIME ’s telescope array will come online , with the finish of adding C of extra bursts to the FRB armory , Eftekhari said . " We ’ll be capable to surge in on the environments of stacks more of these events and hound them back to different types of galaxies , " she sum .
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