Astronomers have been scratching their heads over fast radio bursts — ultra-brief signals from distant galaxies. Some flare up repeatedly, others just once. A new hypothesis: they all come from magnetars — dead stars with colossal magnetic fields. But these magnetars aren’t round; they’re squashed, spinning like a launched top with a wobbling axis.
Because of this wobble, the radio beam shooting along magnetic lines sweeps erratically through space. When it points at Earth, we see a flash; when it veers away — silence. So repeating bursts are periods when the beam grazes us, and one-offs are random hits amid the wandering.
This same crookedness conceals gravitational waves from the star's rotation. The signal is smeared, and detectors like those built by Rainer Weiss can't pick it up. The irony is that the rickety top masks the subtle gravitational ripple we could otherwise hear. Yet the first pulsar, a close relative of magnetars, was discovered in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell Burnell, and its rhythmic signals were initially mistaken for a message from another civilization.
as written by the authors arXiv:2601.04953v3
Some of the mysterious temporal properties of Fast Radio Bursts (FRB) may be explained if they are produced by dynamically triaxial magnetars. If the bursts are narrowly collimated along open field lines, then observed repeating FRB are those few whose rotation axis, open field lines and infrequent radiation (analogous to pulsar giant pulses) point nearly to the observer. In apparently non-repeating FRB these are misaligned and the directions of the open field lines and infrequent radiation wander across the sky as they rotate, reducing their observed duty factors by several orders of magnitude. In repeaters a triaxial moment tensor moves the radiation pattern into or out of the line of sight on long (precessional) time scales, explaining periods of greater or lesser (or absent) activity. The dynamics of triaxial bodies may thwart the coherent integration of gravitational signals from rotating neutron stars.
The most powerful known magnetar releases more energy in a tenth of a second than the Sun does in 100,000 years.