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​A new technology that can improve gravitational-wave detectors, one of the most sensitive instruments used by scientific researchers, has been pioneered by physicists at The University of Western Australia in collaboration with an international team of researchers.
 
The new technology allows the world’s existing gravitational wave detectors to achieve a sensitivity that was previously thought only to be achievable by building much bigger detectors.
 
The paper, published today in Communications Physics, was led by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) at UWA, in collaboration with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems, the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
 
Emeritus Professor David Blair, from UWA’s Department of Physics, said the technology merged quantum particles of sound vibration called phonons with photons of laser light, to create a new type of amplification in which the merged particles cycled back and forth billions of times without being lost.
 
“More than a hundred years ago Einstein proved that light comes as little energy packets, which we now call photons,” Emeritus Professor Blair said.

​​Astronomers have for the first time used distant galaxies as ‘scintillating pins’ to locate and identify a piece of the Milky Way’s missing matter.
 
For decades, scientists have been puzzled as to why they couldn’t account for all the matter in the universe as predicted by theory. While most of the universe’s mass is thought to be mysterious dark matter and dark energy, 5 percent is ‘normal matter’ that makes up stars, planets, asteroids, peanut butter and butterflies. This is known as baryonic matter.
 
However, direct measurement has only accounted for about half the expected baryonic matter.
 
Yuanming Wang, a doctoral candidate in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney, has developed an ingenious method to help track down the missing matter. She has applied her technique to pinpoint a hitherto undetected stream of cold gas in the Milky Way about 10 light years from Earth. The cloud is about a trillion kilometres long and 10 billion kilometres wide but only weighing about the mass of our Moon.
 
The results, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, offer a promising way for scientists to track down the Milky Way’s missing matter.
 
“We suspect that much of the ‘missing’ baryonic matter is in the form of cold gas clouds either in galaxies or between galaxies,” said Ms Wang, who is pursuing her PhD at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy.
 
“This gas is undetectable using conventional methods, as it emits no visible light of its own and is just too cold for detection via radio astronomy,” she said.
 
What the astronomers did is look for radio sources in the distant background to see how they ‘shimmered’.
 
“We found five twinkling radio sources on a giant line in the sky. Their signals show their light must have passed through the same cold clump of gas,” Ms Wang said.
 
Just as visible light is distorted as it passes through our atmosphere to give stars their twinkle, when radio waves pass through matter, it also affects their brightness. It was this ‘scintillation’ that Ms Wang and her colleagues detected.
 
Dr Artem Tuntsov, a co-author from Manly Astrophysics, said: “We aren’t quite sure what the strange cloud is, but one possibility is that it could be a hydrogen ‘snow cloud’ disrupted by a nearby star to form a long, thin clump of gas.”
 
Hydrogen freezes at about minus 260 degrees and theorists have proposed that some of the universe’s missing baryonic matter could be locked up in these hydrogen ‘snow clouds’. They are almost impossible to detect directly.
 
“However, we have now developed a method to identify such clumps of ‘invisible’ cold gas using background galaxies as pins,” Ms Wang said.
 
Ms Wang’s supervisor, Professor Tara Murphy, said: “This is a brilliant result for a young astronomer. We hope the methods trailblazed by Yuanming will allow us to detect more missing matter.”
 
The data to find the gas cloud was taken using the CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope in Western Australia.
 
Dr Keith Bannister, Principal Research Engineer at CSIRO, said: “It is ASKAP’s wide field of view, seeing tens of thousands of galaxies in a single observation that allowed us to measure the shape of the gas cloud.”
 
Professor Murphy said: “This is the first time that multiple ‘scintillators’ have been detected behind the same cloud of cold gas. In the next few years, we should be able to use similar methods with ASKAP to detect a large number of such gas structures in our galaxy.”
 
The research was done in collaboration with CSIRO, Manly Astrophysics, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, OzGrav.

Media release written and edited by The University of Sydney media office. 

Congratulations to OzGrav researchers Adam Deller, Ryan Shannon, Cherie Day, Stefan Oslowski, Chris Flynn, Wael Farah, on receiving the Newcomb Cleveland prize from the AAAS. The award is for the best paper published in Science Magazine in the last year and was awarded for their paper that presented the discovery of the first localised one-off FRB: 'A single fast radio burst localized to a massive galaxy at cosmological distance'. 

Full media release by CSIRO here: https://www.csiro.au/en/News/News-releases/2021/In-the-blink-of-an-eye-astronomers-win-prestigious-American-science-prize 

​Astronomers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) and CSIRO have just observed bizarre, never-seen-before behaviour from a ‘radio-loud’ magnetar—a rare type of neutron star and one of the strongest magnets in the Universe.
 
Their new findings, published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), suggest magnetars have more complex magnetic fields than previously thought – which may challenge theories of how they are born and evolve over time.
 
Magnetars are a rare type of rotating neutron star with some of the most powerful magnetic fields in the Universe. Astronomers have detected only thirty of these objects in and around the Milky Way—most of them detected by X-ray telescopes following a high-energy outburst.
 
However, a handful of these magnetars have also been seen to emit radio pulses similar to pulsars—the less magnetic cousins of magnetars that produce beams of radio waves from their magnetic poles. Tracking how the pulses from these ‘radio-loud’ magnetars change over time offers a unique window into their evolution and geometry.
 
In March 2020, a new magnetar named Swift J1818.0-1607 (J1818 for short) was discovered after it emitted a bright X-ray burst. Rapid follow-up observations detected radio pulses originating from the magnetar. Curiously, the appearance of the radio pulses from J1818 were quite different to those seen from other radio-loud magnetars.
 
Most radio pulses from magnetars maintain a consistent brightness across a wide range of observing frequencies. However, the pulses from J1818 were much brighter at low frequencies than high frequencies – similar to what is seen in pulsars, another more common type of radio-emitting neutron star.
 
In order to better understand how J1818 would evolve over time, a team led by scientists from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) observed it eight times using the CSIRO Parkes radio telescope (also known as Murriyang) between May and October 2020.
 
During this time, they found the magnetar underwent a brief identity crisis: in May it was still emitting the unusual pulsar-like pulses that had been detected previously; however, by June it had started flickering between a bright and a weak state. This flickering behaviour reached a peak in July where they saw it flicking back and forth between emitting pulsar-like and magnetar-like radio pulses.
 
“This bizarre behaviour has never been seen before in any other radio-loud magnetar,” explains study lead author and Swinburne University/CSIRO PhD student Marcus Lower. “It appears to have only been a short-lived phenomenon as by our next observation it had settled permanently into this new magnetar-like state.”

The scientists also looked for pulse shape and brightness changes at different radio frequencies and compared their observations to a 50-year-old theoretical model. This model predicts the expected geometry of a pulsar, based on the twisting direction of its polarised light.
“From our observations, we found that the magnetic axis of J1818 isn’t aligned with its rotation axis,” says Lower.

“Instead, the radio-emitting magnetic pole appears to be in its southern hemisphere, located just below the equator. Most other magnetars have magnetic fields that are aligned with their spin axes or are a little ambiguous.”

“This is the first time we have definitively seen a magnetar with a misaligned magnetic pole.”
Remarkably, this magnetic geometry appears to be stable over most observations. This suggests any changes in the pulse profile are simply due to variations in the height the radio pulses are emitted above the neutron star surface. However, the August 1st 2020 observation stands out as a curious exception.

“Our best geometric model for this date suggests that the radio beam briefly flipped over to a completely different magnetic pole located in the northern hemisphere of the magnetar,” says Lower.
A distinct lack of any changes in the magnetar’s pulse profile shape indicate the same magnetic field lines that trigger the ‘normal’ radio pulses must also be responsible for the pulses seen from the other magnetic pole.

The study suggests this is evidence that the radio pulses from J1818 originate from loops of magnetic field lines connecting two closely spaced poles, like those seen connecting the two poles of a horseshoe magnet or sunspots on the Sun. This is unlike most ordinary neutron stars which are expected to have north and south poles on opposite sides of the star that are connected by a donut-shaped magnetic field.

This peculiar magnetic field configuration is also supported by an independent study of the X-rays pulses from J1818 that were detected by the NICER telescope on board the International Space Station. The X-rays appear to come from either a single distorted region of magnetic field lines that emerge from the magnetar surface or two smaller, but closely spaced, regions.
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These discoveries have potential implications for computer simulations of how magnetars are born and evolve over long periods of time, as more complex magnetic field geometries will change how quickly their magnetic fields are expected to decay over time. Additionally, theories that suggest fast radio bursts can originate from magnetars will have to account for radio pulses potentially originating from multiple active sites within their magnetic fields.
 
Catching a flip between magnetic poles in action could also afford the first opportunity to map the magnetic field of a magnetar.
 
"The Parkes telescope will be watching the magnetar closely over the next year" says scientist and study co-author Simon Johnston, from the CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science.