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.”
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The event was spotted by NASA s Fermi satellite, which detects gamma rays from space. These are the highest energy form of light, and can only come from fantastically energetic and violent events: Exploding stars, black holes gobbling down matter, and the like.
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The burst of gamma rays was seen on April 15, 2020, and was quickly pinpointed to be coming from NGC 253, a nearly edge-on spiral galaxy about 11 million light years away. While that s close as galaxies go it s still a long walk from Earth. yet even from that distance Fermi easily detected the radiation blasted away by the event.
During the past two years, two strange events have occurred at our Milky Way’s violent center. In October of 2019, Milky Way’s central black hole, SgrA (literally “Sagittarius A-star”) which until May, 2019, when it suddenly brightened, appeared like a massive, dormant volcano, a sleeping monster, a slumbering region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that “what goes into them does not come out”. A “one-way door out of our universe,” said Event Horizon Telescope director and astronomer Shep Doeleman of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics about discoveries of the enigmatic objects stranger than science fiction that led to three 2020 Noble Prize awards in physics.
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A new Chinese space mission will watch for gamma ray bursts from merging neutron stars. UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK/MARK GARLICK/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY 4.0)
China launches gamma ray–hunting satellites to trace sources of gravitational waves
Dec. 10, 2020 , 10:35 AM
The China National Space Administration’s Chang’e-5 mission, set to return Moon rocks to Earth next week, has grabbed headlines around the world. But China’s other space agency, the science-focused National Space Science Center (NSSC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), is making news of its own: Just after 4 a.m. local time today it launched its Gravitational Wave High-energy Electromagnetic Counterpart All-sky Monitor (GECAM) from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan province.