Abstract
Magnetars are neutron stars with extremely high magnetic fields (≳1014 gauss) that exhibit various X-ray phenomena such as sporadic subsecond bursts, long-term persistent flux enhancements and variable rotation-period derivative1,2. In 2020, a fast radio burst (FRB), akin to cosmological millisecond-duration radio bursts, was detected from the Galactic magnetar SGR 1935+2154 (refs. 3,4,5), confirming the long-suspected association between some FRBs and magnetars. However, the mechanism for FRB generation in magnetars remains unclear. Here we report the X-ray observation of two glitches in SGR 1935+2154 within a time interval of approximately nine hours, bracketing an FRB that occurred on 14 October 20226,7. Each glitch involved a significant increase in the magnetar’s spin frequency, being among the largest abrupt changes in neutron-star rotation8,9,10 observed so far. Between the glitches, the magnetar exhibited a rapid spin-down phase, accompanied by an increase and subsequent decline in its persistent X-ray emission and burst rate. We postulate that a strong, ephemeral, magnetospheric wind11 provides the torque that rapidly slows the star’s rotation. The trigger for the first glitch couples the star’s crust to its magnetosphere, enhances the various X-ray signals and spawns the wind that alters magnetospheric conditions that might produce the FRB.
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Data availability
NICER raw data and calibrated level-2 data files were generated at the Goddard Space Flight Center large-scale facility. These data files are publicly available and can be found on HEASARC data archive (https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/FTP/nicer/data/obs/). NuSTAR data files are also publicly available at NUMASTER table (https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/all/numaster.html).
Code availability
Reduction and analysis of the data were conducted using publicly available codes provided by the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC), which is a service of the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA/GSFC and the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. For NICER and NuSTAR, we used NICERDAS version v009 and NUSTARDAS version v2.1.2, respectively, part of HEASOFT 6.31 (https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/software/lheasoft). Spectral analysis was conducted using Xspec version 12.13.0 (https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/xanadu/xspec/). The emcee MCMC sampler is a public software available at https://emcee.readthedocs.io/en/stable/. The PINT is a public software available at https://nanograv-pint.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html. The custom codes for the timing analysis routines are available upon reasonable request from the corresponding authors.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) through the NICER mission and the Astrophysics Explorers Program. This research has also made use of data obtained with NuSTAR, a project led by Caltech, funded by NASA and managed by NASA/JPL, and has utilized the NUSTARDAS software package, jointly developed by the ASDC (Italy) and Caltech (USA). This research has made use of data and software provided by the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC), which is a service of the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA/GSFC and the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. C.-P.H. acknowledges support from the National Science and Technology Council in Taiwan through grants 109-2112-M-018-009-MY3 and 112-2112-M-018-004-MY3. T.E. acknowledges the RIKEN Hakubi project, JST grant number JPMJFR202O (Sohatsu), and JSPS/MEXT KAKENHI grant number 22H01267. Z.W. acknowledges support by NASA under award number 80GSFC21M0002. W.C.G.H. acknowledges support through grants 80NSSC22K0397 and 80NSSC23K0078 from NASA. M.G.B. acknowledges the support of the National Science Foundation through grant AST-1813649 and NASA through grant 80NSSC20K1564. S.G. acknowledges the support from the CNES. K.R. acknowledges support from the Vici research programme ‘ARGO’ with project number 639.043.815, financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). NICER research at NRL is supported by NASA.
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C.-P.H. led the data analysis, performed the timing analysis and contributed to writing the paper. T.N., T.E., T.G. and S.G. performed the spectral analysis and contributed to writing the paper. T.E. led the NICER and NuSTAR collaboration. G.Y. and T.E. triggered the NICER DDT and joint NICER/NuSTAR GO ToO programme (NICER Cycle 4 proposal number 5076), respectively. G.Y. and P.S.R. supported the timing analysis and contributed to writing the paper. Z.W., W.C.G.H. and M.G.B. led the theoretical interpretations and contributed to writing the paper. K.R., C.K., Z.A., A.K.H. and K.C.G. contributed to writing the paper.
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Extended data figures and tables
Extended Data Fig. 1 Phase evolution of TOAs between 2022 October 12 and November 6 with respect to the pre-glitch ephemeris.
The orange line is the best-fit two-glitch model, where the red vertical line denotes the time of the CHIME FRB detection. The times of two glitches are shown as the vertical dashed-dotted line (first glitch) and the dotted line (second glitch). The gray box denotes the zoom-in region shown in Fig. 1. The residual is shown in the lower panel.
Extended Data Fig. 2 Posterior probability density distributions of the emcee sampler.
The total simulation steps is 100,000. Two spin-up glitches are needed, where the first one is accompanied by an increase in the spin-down rate, while the second glitch is accompanied by a decrease in the spin-down rate. The change in the spin-down rate of these two glitches is mostly canceled out. In the 1-D histograms, the dashed lines represent the best-fit value along with its 1σ standard deviation.
Extended Data Fig. 3 Phase evolution of TOAs determined with NICER and NuSTAR based on the post-glitch ephemeris.
The symbols used here are the same as those in Extended Data Fig. 1. The red dashed curve is the best-fit polynomial ephemeris up to the 8th order time derivative of ν. This model has exactly the same number of free parameters as that of the two-glitch model. The residual of the two-glitch model is shown in panel (b), while that of the 8th-order polynomial is shown in panel (c).
Extended Data Fig. 4 Time-resolved pulse profiles obtained with NICER and NuSTAR.
The left panel shows the pulse profile obtained with NICER in 2–8 keV in time intervals of t < tg1, tg1 < t < tg2, and t > tg2. The right panel depicts the evolution of the 20–79 keV hard X-ray profile obtained with NuSTAR.
Extended Data Fig. 5 Two-dimensional \({{\boldsymbol{Z}}}_{{\bf{2}}}^{{\bf{2}}}\)-test searching result between two glitches.
We performed searches in the a. 3–79 keV, b. 3–5 keV, c. 5–10 keV, d. 10–20 keV, and e. 20–79 keV bands using NuSTAR data. X- and y-axes of panels b–d are the same as that of panel a. The color map of each panel denotes the \({Z}_{2}^{2}\) values, while the peak is marked with the green plus sign. The green contours denote \({Z}_{2}^{2}(\max )-2.3\), \({Z}_{2}^{2}(\max )-6\), and \({Z}_{2}^{2}(\max )-15\) where \({Z}_{2}^{2}(\max )\) is the maximum \({Z}_{2}^{2}\) value of the peak.
Extended Data Fig. 6 Spectral fitting results for burst emission from SGR 1935 + 2154 at the epochs between two glitches (Epochs B, C, and D).
The data are extracted from NICER (black), NuSTAR FPMA(red), and NuSTAR FPMB (green). All the detected burst events are accumulated. The total exposure of the NuSTAR data is 824 s. The accumulated spectrum is fitted by a model with an absorbed blackbody plus a power law with an exponential roll-off. Top, middle, and bottom panels show the count spectral components, fitting residuals, and spectra in νFν form, respectively.
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Hu, CP., Narita, T., Enoto, T. et al. Rapid spin changes around a magnetar fast radio burst. Nature 626, 500–504 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-07012-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-07012-5
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