Scientists have discovered that mysterious blasts of energy called fast radio bursts (FRBs) may be created when asteroids slam into ultradense extreme dead stars called neutron stars. Such a collision releases enough energy to supply humanity’s power needs for 100 million years!
FRBs are transient pulses of radio waves that can last from a fraction of a millisecond to a few seconds. In this period, an FRB can release the same amount of energy that it would take the sun several days to radiate.
The first FRB was observed in 2007, and since then, these blasts of energy have maintained their aura of mystery because they were infrequently detected until 2017. That was the year when the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) came online and began making frequent FRB discoveries.
“FRBs so far defy explanation, with over 50 potential hypotheses of where they come from – we counted!” team leader and University of Toronto scientist Dang Pham told Space.com.
The possible connection between FRBs and asteroids, as well as comets slamming into neutron stars, has been suggested before. This new research by Pham and colleagues further solidifies that link.
“It’s been known for many years that asteroids and comets impacting neutron stars can cause FRB-like signals, but until now, it was unclear if this happened often enough across the universe to explain the rate at which we observe FRBs occurring,” Pham said. “We have shown that interstellar objects (ISOs), an understudied class of asteroids and comets thought to be present between stars in galaxies throughout the universe, could be numerous enough that their impacts with neutron stars could explain FRBs!”
Pham added that the team’s research also showed other expected properties of these impacts match up with observations of FRBs such as their durations, energies, and the rate at which they occur over the lifetime of the universe.
The question is: Even though asteroid impacts can be devastating (just ask the dinosaurs), how could they possibly release the same amount of energy that a star takes days to radiate?
Extreme stars mean extreme explosions
Neutron stars are created when massive stars die and their cores collapse, creating dense bodies with the mass of the sun, only crammed into a width no larger than the average city on Earth.
The result is a stellar remnant with extreme properties, such as the densest matter in the known universe (one teaspoon would weigh 10 million tons if brought to Earth) and…
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