Mysterious ultrabright and potent flashes of energy, more powerful than those emitted by the sun, have been spotted in the Milky Way for the first time.

Known as fast radio bursts (FRB), these high-intensity emissions usually last only for a fraction of a second.

FRBs were first detected in 2007 but they were too far away to clearly make out where they originated from.

But the researchers say their recently-discovered radio flares are the closest FRBs identified to date and come from an astronomical object known as a magnetar, about 30,000 light years from Earth.

Magnetars are a type of neutron star with a hugely powerful magnetic field - only a handful of them are thought to be present in the Milky Way.

Physicists have previously speculated that magnetars might produce FRBs but there was no evidence to prove that was the case.

Kiyoshi Masui, an assistant professor of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, who led the team that analysed the brightness of the FRBs, said: "There's this great mystery as to what would produce these great outbursts of energy, which until now we've seen coming from halfway across the universe.


The findings, published in three separate papers in the journal Nature, come from an international team of more than 50 researchers.


These included two ground-based radio telescopes - the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) and the Survey for Transient Astronomical Radio Emission 2 (STARE2) - and three X-ray telescopes, including European Space Agency's INTEGRAL space telescope.

The researchers said they first observed X-ray bursts from the magnetar, which were then followed by brief but brilliant radio flares within several milliseconds of each other.


Christopher Bochenek, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, US, who is part of the team looking at data from the STARE2 telecsope, said: "In about one millisecond, this magnetar has emitted about as much energy in radio waves as the sun does in 30 seconds."

However, questions still remain as to how magnetars produce FRBs.

Prof Masui said: "We're trying to piece together what it all means.
