Galactic flash points to long-sought source for enigmatic radio bursts
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/galactic-flash-points-long-sought-source-enigmatic-radio-bursts
Magnetars are neutron stars with magnetic fields 100 million times stronger than that of any magnet on Earth.
On 28 April, as Earth’s rotation swept a Canadian radio telescope across the sky, it watched for mysterious millisecondslong flashes called fast radio bursts (FRBs). At 7:34 a.m. local time an enormous one appeared, but awkwardly, in the peripheral vision of the scope. “It was way off the edge of the telescope,” says Paul Scholz, an astronomer at the University of Toronto and a member of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME). Because of its brightness, the team knew its source was nearby. All other FRBs seen so far have erupted in distant galaxies—too far and too fast to figure out what produced them.