A team led by Eric Linder from the University of California at Berkeley was relieved to find that they had measured nothing: there was no gamma-ray flash from the magnetar SGR J1935+2154. The neutron star in the Milky Way has thus followed the three-month resting phase that they publicly forecast. Only after this period was over, the celestial body blinked again as a gamma-ray flash on June 24, 2021.
Linder and his colleagues are looking for the complex activity cycles of cosmic objects. Traditionally, a distinction is made between periodic events that occur after the same fixed period and completely irregular ones that do not follow any recognizable pattern – such as the release of radiation from rapidly rotating neutron stars. explosion.
In the case of the SGR J1935+2154 object, however, unexpected bursts of soft gamma radiation are overlaid with periodic patterns of passivity. The star remains silent for about three months and then goes into four months of activity. Accordingly, in mid-March of this year, before the eyes of the international astronomy community, he predicted that gamma-ray bursts would not be recorded again until June 1. That’s exactly what happened.
in trade magazine »Physical Review D« Explain the circumstances of their discovery. To do this, they analyzed data that the WIND satellite has recorded from this magnetar since 2014. So that they could clearly identify patterns in irregular blinking, they resorted to mathematical methods that had been developed to detect patterns in the spatial distribution of galaxies. Linder and his colleagues transferred this to the temporal distribution of gamma-ray bursts.
