Astronomers trace mysterious space radio waves to a source within our galaxy

In April, a group of astronomers spotted a short, powerful blast of radio waves coming from outer space and then successfully found where it was coming from: a powerful object within our own galaxy. It’s the first time scientists have been able to pinpoint these mysterious radio waves coming from inside the Milky Way, making them the closest of their kind that we’ve ever seen.

The radio waves — known as fast radio bursts, or FRBs — seem to have sprouted from an incredibly powerful “zombie” star lurking in our galaxy, according to three papers published in the journal Nature. Called a neutron star, the object is a super dense leftover that forms when a massive star, bigger than our own Sun, collapses in on itself. But this neutron star is...

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