Neutrinos could reveal how fast radio bursts are launched
For over a decade, astronomers have puzzled over the origins of fast radio bursts, brief blasts of radio waves that come mostly from distant galaxies. During that same period, scientists have also detected high-energy neutrinos, ghostly particles from outside the Milky Way whose origins are also unknown. A new theory suggests that the two enigmatic signals could come from a single cosmic source: highly active and magnetized neutron stars called magnetars. If true, that could fill in the details of how fast radio bursts, or FRBs, occur. However, finding the “smoking gun” — catching a simultaneous neutrino and radio burst from the same magnetar — will be challenging because such neutrinos would be rare and hard to find, says astrophysicist Brian Metzger of Columbia University. He and his colleagues described the idea in a study posted September 1 at arXiv.org. Even so, “this paper gives a possible link between what I think...