The newest cosmic mystery: four distinct high-energy flashes! (Is the Universe trying to get our attention?) Astronomers are calling them Fast Radio Bursts, but we have yet to determine their origins.

Radio astronomers detected the first burst about six years ago, but it seemed so strange that many people thought it was a fluke. Dan Thornton, a PhD student at England’s University of Manchester and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, decided to investigate. He spent the next six years looking for these strange flashes.

So far Thornton and his team have found four radio bursts. Astonishingly, the flashes—taken from only a small section of the sky—indicate that there should be one of these signals going off every ten seconds.

“The bursts last only a tenth of the blink of an eye,” explained Max-Planck Institute Director and Manchester professor, Michael Kramer. “With current telescopes we need to be lucky to look at the right spot at the right time. But if we could view the sky with ‘radio eyes’ there would be flashes going off all over the sky every day.”

Astronomers have ruled out terrestrial sources for the Fast Radio Bursts and the origins in the high galactic latitudes suggest that they originate from beyond the Milky Way.

The brightness and distance of the mysterious flashes also hint that they originated when the Universe was about half its current age. “They have come such a long way that by the time they reach the Earth, the Parkes telescope would have to operate for one million years to collect enough to have the equivalent energy of a flying mosquito,” said Thornton.

Co-author Professor Matthew Bailes, from the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, thinks that burst energies indicate that they come from events involving relativistic objects—maybe even from a type of neutron star called a magnetar. “Magnetars can give off more energy in a millisecond than our Sun does in 300,000 years and are a leading candidate for the burst.”

Astronomers have a lot more research to do before we can solve the radio burst puzzle, but the findings may also help crack some other astronomical mysteries. “We are still not sure about what makes up the space between galaxies, so we will be able to use these radio bursts like probes in order to understand more about some of the missing matter in the Universe,” said Ben Stappers, from Manchester’s School of Physics and Astronomy.

So these Fast Radio Bursts could even speed up cosmic discovery!

Alyssa Keimach is an astronomy and astrophysics student at the University of Michigan and interns for the Morrison Planetarium.

Image: Diceman Stephen West

Like humans, stars have life cycles. And new data emerging about stellar life cycles allow us to create new diagrams of the stars’ anatomy.

Stars come in all different sizes, and a star’s mass determines its fate: an extremely massive star produces a supernova when it “dies.” But that’s not quite the end of the story… Sometimes the core of a massive star will collapse in on itself, forming a neutron star.

These extremely dense, hot, and pressurized stellar remnants are tiny—about the diameter of San Francisco—but up to three times the mass of our Sun!

It gets crazier. Stars like these spin at hyper speeds—full rotations occurring many times per second! Astronomers can measure the number of rotations by counting the radio pulses that some neutron stars emit with each spin. It turns out that the rate of rotation slows with age as the spinning stars lose momentum.

The gradual slowing of rotational velocity over time is occasionally accented with moments of abrupt velocity increase, known as glitches. Astronomers thought they knew what caused these glitches, until they measured a new type of glitch, as reported recently in Nature.

“I looked at the data and was shocked—the neutron star had suddenly slowed down,” says co-author Rob Archibald, a graduate student at McGill University.

Archibald and his colleagues discovered that spin velocities of unique stars are accented with moments of abrupt velocity decrease, or, an “anti-glitch.”

Anti-glitches were found in a type of neutron star called a magnetar, cleverly named after the unusually intense magnetic field within the star that results in bursts of X-ray radiation.

“We’ve seen huge X-ray explosions from magnetars before, but an anti-glitch was quite a surprise,” says lead author Victoria Kaspi, leader of the Swift magnetar monitoring program. “This is telling us something brand new about the insides of these amazing objects.”

Anti-glitches were not predicted in original neutron star models, so astrophysicists may need to reevaluate all of glitch theory. New models for neutron star anatomy (that accommodate the physics behind anti-glitches) could be on the way!

Alyssa Keimach is an astronomy and astrophysics student at the University of Michigan and interns for the Morrison Planetarium.

Image: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center