Weird cosmic object keeps exploding over and over, and scientists don’t know why
A mysterious object has shot out 1,652 blasts of energy over a short period. Though researchers are still stumped as to what caused the repeated eruptions, they hope their observations will help them get closer to an answer. The entity is a fast radio burst (FRB), an enigmatic phenomenon first observed in 2007. FRBs produce pulses in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum; these pulses last only a few thousandths of a second, but produce as much energy as the Sun does in a year.
Some FRBs emit energy just once, but several – including an object called FRB 121102, located in a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light years away – are known to repeat their bursts. Using the Five-hundredmeter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in China, scientists decided to conduct an extensive study of this repeating FRB. Over about 60 hours, the researchers watched FRB 121102 explode 1,652 times – sometimes up to 117 times per hour, far more than any previously known repeating FRB.
Most FRBs occur in the distant universe, which makes them difficult to study. But in 2020, astronomers found an FRB inside our Milky Way, allowing them to determine that the source was a type of dead star called a magnetar. Whether all FRBs are magnetars has yet to be determined. If FRB 121102 is indeed a magnetar, the data collected on it suggests that the quick explosive bursts are happening right on the surface of the star itself, and not in the surrounding gas and dust.