Two mysterious fast radio bursts originated from wildly different places in space | CNN

Mysterious fast radio bursts, or millisecond-long bright flashes of radio waves from space, have intrigued astronomers since the first detection of the phenomenon in 2007 .

Researchers are still trying to unravel what the celestial pulses are, as well as how and where they occur.

One of the bursts appears to have come from the chaotic, magnetically active environment near a type of dense neutron star called a magnetar.

Another burst came from a distant dead, star-starved galaxy.

Researchers pinpointed the explosion responsible for the burst to the magnetosphere, a magnetically active area about 6,213 miles ( 10,000 kilometers ) away from a rotating neutron star.

Zooming in to this small region around a star from 200 million light-years away is “like being able to measure the width of a DNA helix, which is about 2 nanometers wide, on the surface of the moon , an MIT professor says.

The finding is the first time astronomers have determined FRBs can be generated in the immediate vicinity of a neutron star — a celestial object with the strongest known magnetic field.

FRB 20240209A may have come from a dense cluster of stars, where it’s possible magnetars could form due to the merger of two neutron stars, or a dead white dwarf star collapsing in on itself.

The new research sheds more light on what causes fast radio bursts and where they occur.