RAPIDLY ROTATING PULSARS AS POSSIBLE SOURCES OF FAST RADIO BURSTS

Image: Artist's impression of a magnetar. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

In a recent paper (Lyutikov et al. 2016) the authors discuss possible association of fast radio bursts (FRBs) with supergiant pulses emitted by young pulsars (ages ~ tens to hundreds of years) born with regular magnetic field but very short - few milliseconds - spin periods.
A fast radio burst (FRB) is a high-energy astrophysical phenomenon manifested as a transient radio pulse lasting only a few milliseconds. They are bright, unresolved, broadband, millisecond flashes, found in parts of the sky outside the Milky Way.

The authors argued that the physical constraints imposed by the properties of FRBs limit their origin to the magnetospheres of neutron stars. Two special types could satisfy those constraints: fast rotating young neutron stars (using the rotational energy to generate FRBs), or very high magnetic fields neutron stars - magnetars (using the magnetic energy).

The key distinction between the two possibilities would be a detection of high energy emission contemporaneous with an FRB - Crab giant pulses do not show high energy signals.

Lyutikov et al. 2016 (preprint) - Fast radio bursts as giant pulses from young rapidly rotating pulsars - (arXiv)

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CONSTRAINTS ON THE LOCATION OF A POSSIBLE 9TH PLANET

Image: The six most distant known objects in the solar system with orbits exclusively beyond Neptune (magenta) all mysteriously line up in a single direction. Such an orbital alignment can only be maintained by some outside force, Batygin and Brown say. Their paper argues that a planet with 10 times the mass of the earth in a distant eccentric orbit anti-aligned with the other six objects (orange) is required to maintain this configuration. Credit: Caltech The astronomers have noticed some of the dwarf planets and other small, icy objects tend to follow orbits that cluster together. To explain the unusual distribution of these Kuiper Belt objects, several authors have advocated the existence of a superEarth planet in the outer solar system ( planet Nine or planet X ).

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