Dead star 'glitches' could reveal the origins of fast radio bursts

[Admin]

Two glitches in the rotation of a highly magnetic neutron star or 'magnetar' could help reveal the interior of neutron stars and get to the bottom of how these compact dead stars blast out fast radio bursts.

Dead star 'glitches' could reveal the origins of fast radio bursts : Read more

 

[Torbjorn Larsson]

Looks like a tremendous observation from coincidental factors involving distances and alignments:

Until 2020, almost all known FRBs originated in faraway galaxies. ... The team watched the neutron star rotate by virtue of a hotspot on its surface, which likely marks one of the poles of the star’s magnetic field. As the hotspot spins in and out of view — 3.2 times every second! —the neutron star’s brightness appears to pulse.

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/neutron-star-glitches-key-mysterious-radio-bursts/

It potentially explains neutron star superfluid innards and superfluid/hard crust coupling as well as FRBs in magnetars and some rapidly spinning neutron stars.

"These X-ray events could then change the environment in the magnetosphere, making it more suitable for FRB emission, which is a laser-like process that requires a clean environment.

The paper mentions a pair-production cascade model that implies the laser analog process [ibid.].

That makes sense, though, if the glitch marked a starquake also released charged particles in a brief blast of wind. That wind would have robbed the star of its spin almost as quickly as it had gained it.

Then, with all of those particles hanging around in an uber-powerful magnetic field — which is far stronger than any we can make on Earth — the conditions were right for an extreme scenario. Particles (specifically, electrons and their antimatter partners, positrons) are born in pairs from the magnetic field's energy, resulting in what Hu calls an “avalanche.”

“One electron makes a pair, and then each child makes several more, and so on for several generations, until there are thousands of progenies per electron,” he says. These electron-positron pairs could ultimately be responsible for the sudden burst of radio emission in a “laser-like process,” Hu adds.