A commentary of “Consistency radio bursts in the Milky Way”: 10 remarkable discoveries from 2020 in Nature

Abstract

The first detection and deep follow-up of a Galactic fast radio burst (FRB) phenomenon were reported in three papers published in the journal Nature in November 2020. Interestingly, this FRB is accompanied by a X-ray burst. The observations from multiple space and ground-based telescopes were combined to accomplish this discovery and ascertain its association with a source in the Milky Way. As the name implies, a FRB is a transient bright pulse of radio waves with a burst duration measured in milliseconds. This phenomenon was first discovered in 2007. It is extremely difficult to detect and even more so to determine their position in the sky due to their brief existence. This is the first detection of a FRB with radiation other than radio waves, as well as the first of its kind in the Milky Way. For the first time, these observations have confirmed that the source(s) of FRBs can be a magnetar(s), which so far is the only verified celestial body capable of producing FRBs. It is worth noting that one of the papers was written by a Chinese research team, the co-first authors of which are Lin Lin from Beijing Normal University, Chunfeng Zhang from Peking University, and Pei Wang from the National Astronomical Observatories of China. The observations came from China's “Sky Eye”—the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST).①①Original source in Chinese: Di Li, Consistency radio bursts in the Milky Way, Bulletin of National Natural Science Foundation of China. 35 (2) (2021) 243-244.