Magnetic Stresses & Fast Radio Bursts

Magnetars are restless: they flare, burst, and may power the fast radio bursts detected across the sky. My simulations show where this activity comes from. As the magnetic field inside a neutron star slowly reorganises, it builds up stress in the solid crust until the crust locally breaks, suddenly releasing magnetic energy. How often this happens depends on the total magnetic energy hidden inside the crust, rather than on the field we infer from the star’s spin-down, which explains why some stars with modest external fields still burst. Only a small fraction of these crustal failures would need to be observable to account for the fast radio bursts seen so far.