Fragmenting planets sweeping extremely close to their stars might be the cause of mysterious cosmic blasts of radio waves.
“How fast radio bursts are produced is still up for debate,” says astronomer Yong-Feng Huang of Nanjing University in China.. Such planets can get exceedingly close to these stars, so the team calculated what might happen to a planet in a highly elliptical orbit around a neutron star. When the planet swings very close to its star, the star’s gravity pulls more on the planet than when the planet is at its farthest orbital point, elongating and distorting it.
Then the fireworks start. Neutron stars spew a wind of radiation and particles, much like our own sun but more extreme. When one of these clumps passes through that stellar wind, the interaction “can produce really strong radio emissions,” Huang says. If that happens when the clump appears to pass in front of the star from Earth’s perspective, we might see it as a fast radio burst.
The star’s strong gravitational “tidal” pull on the planet during each close pass might change the planet’s orbit over time, says astrophysicist Wenbin Lu of Princeton University, who was not involved in this study but who investigates possible FRB scenarios. “Every orbit, there is some energy loss from the system,” he says. “Due to tidal interactions between the planet and the star, the orbit very quickly shrinks.
But the orbit change could also give astronomers a way to check this scenario as an FRB source. Observing repeating FRBs over several years to track any changes in the time between bursts could narrow down whether this hypothesis could explain the observations, Lu says. “That may be a good clue.”
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