Sky & Telescope - June 2022 - 11

STARS
Fast Radio Burst's Unlikely
Home Puzzles Astronomers
A BABY SHOWER in a retirement home
would surely raise some eyebrows. Likewise,
astronomers were surprised to find a
fast radio burst (FRB) in a globular cluster.
Strong evidence suggests these powerful,
millisecond-long flashes of radio waves
arise from magnetars, highly magnetized
newborn neutron stars. But stars in globular
clusters are typically billions of years
old, so any supernovae should have gone
off a long time ago and any magnetars produced
would have long since deactivated.
" This is a really astonishing result, " says
magnetar expert Nanda Rea (Institute of
Space Sciences, Spain). " What is a young
neutron star doing in a globular cluster? "
Franz Kirsten (Onsala Space Observatory,
Sweden) and team used the European
Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network
to study five bursts from the repeating
FRB 20200120E, already known to sit
in the outskirts of the nearby galaxy M81.
Using interferometry, the team pinpointed
the sky position of the repeater to
within a mere 1.25 milliarcseconds, placing
it in one of M81's globular clusters.
Since a globular is unlikely to host
young, massive stars, the researchers suggest
in the February 24th Nature that the
magnetar most likely formed some other
way. Perhaps it was born when a white
dwarf siphoned too much mass from a
companion star or when two stellar remnants
merged.
But Rea says there's no unambiguous
evidence that neutron stars form through
accretion-induced or merger-induced collapse.
" So far, it's only theory, " she says.
The nature of the bursts, published
February 23rd in Nature Astronomy, sheds
light on their origin. Kenzie Nimmo
(ASTRON, The Netherlands) and colleagues
found that the same FRB emits
isolated, nanoseconds-long " shots " from
a region just a few dozen meters across,
perhaps via magnetic reconnection around
the magnetar.
As team member Jason Hessels (also at
ASTRON) says, " I would be surprised if
FRBs stop surprising us. "
¢GOVERT SCHILLING
IN BRIEF
No Signal from Cosmic
Dawn
Four years after one experiment
found tentative signs of the universe's
first stars (S&T: June 2018,
p. 8), another searching at the same
frequency has found nothing. Both
experiments were looking for a
low-frequency radio signal created
as the intense radiation of the first
stars ionized their surroundings. To
see this signal, astronomers must
first remove overwhelming background
noise from the Milky Way,
Earth's ionosphere, human technology,
and the detectors themselves.
In 2018, a team working with the
Experiment to Detect the Global
EoR Signature (EDGES) detector in
Western Australia found a tentative
signal at 78 MHz, indicating that the
first stars formed when the universe
was 180 million years old. Oddly,
the strength of the signal indicated
cooler primordial gas than cosmologists
had predicted, requiring nonstandard
physics. But on February
28th in Nature Astronomy, another
team announced that a floating radio
antenna named SARAS 3 found
no signal at that frequency. The
team, led by Saurabh Singh (Raman
Research Institute, India), suggests
that the EDGES " signal " came from
unevenly distributed ground beneath
the detector. Nevertheless, a future
detection remains possible, the
team writes, either by beating down
background noise on Earth or by
positioning a detector on the farside
of the Moon.
¢MONICA YOUNG
Booster Impacts Lunar
Farside
On March 4th, a rocket booster
impacted the farside of the Moon,
crash-landing in Hertzsprung Crater.
Bill Gray (Project Pluto) first noticed
the upcoming encounter in January,
when a close flyby of the Moon set
the booster up for impact in March.
Gray put out an appeal to the Minor
Planet Mailing List for additional
observations to pin down the errant
booster's orbit. While the impact
itself wasn't observed, NASA's Lunar
Reconnaissance Orbiter should be
able to target the area to return images
of the fresh crater. The event
is reminiscent of the Lunar Crater
Observation and Sensing Satellite
(LCROSS), which observed its
spent Centaur upper stage booster
hitting Cabeus Crater in 2009. Which
booster is hitting the Moon this time,
though, remains up for debate: Originally
identified as a SpaceX Falcon 9
upper stage, further observations
(including a spectrum detailing its
composition and archived pings
from a now-defunct amateur radio
attached to the booster) showed it
to be a discarded segment of the
Chinese Chang'e 5-T1 mission,
which launched in October 2014.
However, China's Ministry of Foreign
Affairs denied it was theirs. Regardless
of who it belonged to, the errant
booster highlights a need for better
tracking of high-altitude objects.
¢DAVID DICKINSON
TESS Reaches 5,000
Since its 2018 launch, NASA's
$200 million Transiting Exoplanet
Survey Satellite (TESS) has found
199 confirmed exoplanets among
5,459 " objects of interest " (current
numbers as of press time). The TESS
team typically finds exoplanets by
monitoring hundreds of thousands
of the brightest nearby stars for
brief dips in their light, inspecting
discoveries by eye. However, much
of the TESS catalog's recent gain
comes from an effort led by Michelle
Kunimoto (MIT). As part of the Faint
Star Search, she wrote an algorithm
to investigate the millions of dimmer
stars that TESS observes. The
program doubled the total number of
objects of interest over the last year
alone. These additional objects await
confirmation as exoplanets. A second
mission extension, which seems
to be in the cards, will also enable
synergy with the recently launched
and deployed James Webb Space
Telescope, which the team had
planned from the beginning. With
hundreds of TESS objects confirmed
as planets, the team is keen to use
Webb to take a closer look.
¢ ARWEN RIMMER
sk yand tele scope .o r g * JUNE 2022 11
http://www.skyandtelescope.com

Sky & Telescope - June 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky & Telescope - June 2022

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