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NASA Missions Unmask Magnetar Eruptions in Nearby Galaxies
On April 15, 2020, a brief burst of high-energy light swept through the solar system, triggering instruments on several NASA and European spacecraft. Now, multiple international science teams conclude that the blast came from a supermagnetized stellar remnant known as a magnetar located in a neighboring galaxy.
This finding confirms long-held suspicions that some gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) – cosmic eruptions detected in the sky almost daily – are in fact powerful flares from magnetars relatively close to home.
“This has always been regarded as a possibility, and several GRBs observed since 2005 have provided tantalizing evidence,” said Kevin Hurley, a Senior Space Fellow with the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, who joined several scientists to discuss the burst at the virtual 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. “The April 15 event is a game changer because we foun
For the first time, astronomers have definitively spotted a flaring magnetar in another galaxy.
These ultra-magnetic stellar corpses were thought to be responsible for some of the highest-energy explosions in the nearby universe. But until this burst, no one could prove it, astronomers reported January 13 at the virtual meeting of the American Astronomical Society and in papers in
Nature and
Nature Astronomy.
Astronomers have seen flaring magnetars in the Milky Way, but those are so bright that it’s impossible to get a good look at them. Possible glimpses of flaring magnetars in other galaxies may have been spotted before, too. But “the others were all a little circumstantial, and not as rock solid,” says astrophysicist Victoria Kaspi of the McGill Space Institute in Montreal, who was not involved in the new discovery. “Here you have something that is so incontrovertible, it’s like, okay, this is it. There’s no question anymore.”
AAS #237: five things we learned
Here are the key take-outs from the 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the butterfly wing - shaped nebula, NGC 2346. The nebula is about 2,000 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Monoceros. Credit: NASA/STScI
Each January, the American Astronomical Society (AAS) conducts a meeting widely hailed as the “Superbowl of astronomy”, in which astronomers gather from around the world to share their latest results.
Last year it was in Honolulu. But this year, thanks to COVID-19, it was online something that AAS had already practised for smaller meetings as far back as June 2020. Not surprisingly, given the rehearsal, they did a smash-bang job of it. But they also had a remarkable amount to present… plus a lot of fun.