Scientists Pin Down the Origins of a Fast Radio Burst

MIT scientists have pinpointed the origin of a fast radio burst (FRB) to within 10,000 kilometers of a neutron star, settling a long-standing debate about these cosmic phenomena. Using a novel technique analyzing signal scintillation, researchers determined that FRB 20221022A, detected in 2022 from a galaxy 200 million light-years away, emerged from the star's turbulent magnetosphere rather than from a distant shockwave.

The findings, published in Nature, provide the first conclusive evidence that FRBs can originate in the extreme magnetic environment immediately surrounding these ultra-compact objects.

"...within 10,000 kilometers of a neutron star"

[Valgrus Thunderaxe]

Gee, I wonder where those radio bursts are coming from?

Re:"...within 10,000 kilometers of a neutron star"

[fahrbot-bot]

Gee, I wonder where those radio bursts are coming from?

In the pool, I had "space", so I was close.

Thats unbelievable accuracy

[rossdee]

  "from a galaxy 200 million light-years away"

10,000 km out of 200MLy ?

I don't think we can measure that accurately with our telescopes

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe distance isn't so accurate, but angular resolution is, with whatever technique was mentioned in the article?

Re:Thats unbelievable accuracy

[locofungus]

10,000 km out of 200MLy ?

I don't think we can measure that accurately with our telescopes

I don't know anything about this field but I've just skimmed the abstract.

For radial distance, 10,000km is 33ms. If (and I don't know) these FRB are triggered by something detectable happening in the star then that's trivial to detect but given the distances involved I would assume that they're resolving angular separation...

which the abstract says:

one originating from a scattering screen located within the Milky Way, and the second originating from a scattering screen located within its host galaxy or local environment. We use the scattering media as an astrophysical lens to constrain the size of the lateral emission region

which implies to me that they're using a HUGE pseudo lens so they can resolve the angular separation of the FRB and the neutron star to:
R 3Ã--10^4 km

To summarize, it's true that using an Earth based telescope cannot resolve this, but using gravitational lensing, or in this case "scattering screen" enables us to get angular resolutions that require astronomical sized lenses if we find the right thing to look at in the right way.

Re:Thats unbelievable accuracy

[joe_frisch]

The link roughly describes the technique and its based on looking at the fluctuations in the light. I didn't read in detail, but one way to think about the technique in general is that large objects can't have fast light variations due to speed of light limits - we'd see the fluctuations blurred out by different distances.

Re:

[RockDoctor]

For radial distance, 10,000km is 33ms. If (and I don't know) these FRB are triggered by something detectable happening in the star then that's trivial to detect but given the distances involved I would assume that they're resolving angular separation...

Only indirectly. I think.

which implies to me that they're using a HUGE pseudo lens so they can resolve the angular separation of the FRB and the neutron star

Ummm, I don't think so. (I've only RFT.abstract too, but the supporting material is on ArXiv ; I poste

Re:

[OrangeTide]

I was very impressed by those numbers. It's like measuring 3% of the distance between the Earth and Moon. At that distance that is a staggering precision.

I assume the number comes from the error bars on the measurement. It's roughly centered on the star they observed, and it could be off by the angular tolerances of the instrument they used to measure. It's wild from an engineering perspective though.

Re:

[RockDoctor]

Try a different analogy. (Valid if I've skimmed the papers sanely.)

You have a very abrupt explosion - like a gunshot. You have a wall somewhere nearby (we don't know if it's 10m away or 100m away from the gunshot.

Now the combined sound from that reaches another wall close to your microphone (radio telescope). (In the papers, a "Milky Way scattering screen", while there's another screen in the host galaxy.) The sound hits that and reflects towards your microphone, while the original sound stream also conti

link is broken?

[v1]

Page not found
Sorry, the page you requested is unavailable. The link you requested might be broken, or no longer exist.

Re:link is broken?

[93 Escort Wagon]

The server got fried by a fast radio burst.

Re:

[PLAST]

Apparently, the URLs https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com] and https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586... [doi.org] were thrown together in the article.

Re:

[PLAST]

Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.110... [arxiv.org]

Other paper

[RockDoctor]

The other paper (Nature and the MIT press release mention two linked papers) is also on arXiv : A pulsar-like swing in the polarisation position angle of a nearby fast radio burst [arxiv.org]. There's at least a modest difference in the tile, but that's review for you.

The thing I find interesting is - look at those arXiv codes : for two papers published in 2025-01, the arXiv pre-prints came out in 24-02 and 24-06. 6 to 10 months - that's a short eternity in astrophysics.

Re:

[RockDoctor]

Both papers (Arxiv versions ; I don't have a Nature subscription) have about 17 pages of main paper (including figures and captions), which I infer Nature would have cut down with Genghis Khan levels of mercy. The ArXiv versions also have about 35 pages of "Methods" and "Supporting Material" each. I guess those got fatter in the Nature versions. Review. Editing. Meh.

As I've said ad nauseam before, reading the press release and it's regurgitations is a waste of time compared to RTF.P, and in this case also