It happened 8 billion years ago. Our planet, the sun, and other bodies in our solar system will not form until about 3.5 billion years in the future. There was a huge release of energy in a galaxy far, far away. One of the things it caused was a pulse of radio energy that was extremely powerful, but only about a millisecond long. This pulse was radiated into space in all directions, including in the direction where our world would form billions of years later.
When that pulse of radio energy traveled through intergalactic space, the solar system was born, and life on Earth shortly thereafter.
Dinosaurs have come and gone. Our ancestors came down from trees and gradually developed a high-tech society. They became interested in astronomy and eventually built highly sensitive optical instruments.
radio telescope.
Upon reaching Earth, the now very weak pulse was detected by the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope, a development prototype of the Square Kilometer Array, an international project to build the world’s largest radio telescope. Ta. Australia is also participating. So is Canada.
These short radio pulses have been known for several years and have come to be called fast radio bursts. Many of these are detected primarily by his ASKAP radio telescope in the Southern Hemisphere and by our observatory’s CHIME radio telescope in the Northern Hemisphere. This particular pulse is of particular interest because it is the strongest detected and comes from the farthest away.
Its pulse of radio radiation must have been incredibly powerful for it to be detected after traveling 8 billion light years. Furthermore, if the duration is only a millisecond, the source must be no larger than the distance that light and radio waves travel in one millisecond. That is, the source must be smaller than 300 km. For comparison, the moon’s diameter is 3475 km, more than 11 times larger. However, the small object managed to release in its pulse the total amount of energy that the sun produced in her 30 years. There are three very compact celestial bodies that can generate huge energy emissions. They are black holes, neutron stars, and magnetars.
Black holes are the ultimate energy machines. When you put something in it, its mass is almost completely converted into energy. However, black holes are not good at producing short, sharp pulses of radio energy. Neutron stars, which have shrunk to just a few kilometers in diameter when the core of a dead star collapses, can generate pulses of radio waves, but they are not powerful enough to account for fast radio bursts.
The most popular candidate at the moment is magnetar. These are neutron stars with very strong magnetic fields. These are so powerful that if we were not miraculously transported to the surface of a magnetar and instantly killed by heat, radiation, and immense gravity, we would be killed by the magnetic field, which disrupts our life processes. It will be. If by some further miracle we were able to survive walking on its surface, we would find that walking in the direction of the magnetic field is easy, but walking across the direction of the magnetic field is almost impossible. .
One of the ways magnetars produce powerful energy emissions is through the stress of their strong magnetic fields. As the magnetar rotates, these magnetic fields become increasingly curled up and distorted, potentially storing vast amounts of energy, like an unimaginably large and stretched elastic body. Eventually, as with an overstretched elastic band, the stress in the distorted magnetic field becomes so great that it breaks, releasing a pulse of energy strong enough to be detected billions of light-years away. Masu. That is something to ponder.
After sunset, Saturn will be in the south and Jupiter will be shining in the east. Venus rises early in the morning. There will be a new moon on November 13th.
Ken Tapping is an astronomer at the National Research Council’s Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Penticton.
