Crustal Quakes Spark Magnetospheric Blasts: Imprints of Realistic Magnetar Crust Oscillations on the Fast Radio Burst Signal
-
1.
California Institute of Technology
-
2.
Princeton University
Abstract
Many transients believed to originate from magnetars are thought to be triggered by crustal activity, which feeds back on the surrounding magnetosphere. These perturbations, through a variety of proposed mechanisms, can convert a fraction of the magnetic energy stored in the magnetosphere, as well as the energy injected by crustal activity itself into electromagnetic emission, including X-ray bursts and fast radio bursts. We here provide a first glimpse of this process by coupling magnetoelastic dynamics simulations of the crust to fully three-dimensional relativistic resistive force-free electrodynamic simulations of the magnetosphere. Our simulations demonstrate that the elastodynamical motions of the surface launch a series of fast magnetosonic and Alfvén waves into the magnetosphere. These waves rapidly enter a nonlinear regime, ultimately giving rise to a wide range of phenomena, including monster shock formation, relativistic blast waves, trapped Alfvén waves, nonlinear Alfvén wave ejecta, and transient equatorial current sheets interacting with these waves. After the initial nonlinear phase, the magnetosphere is partially combed out, resembling a strongly perturbed split monopole configuration. Our results can offer hints and potential constraints on fast radio burst emission mechanisms, in particular for hyperactive repeating sources, by placing tight bounds on energy conversion efficiency and possible quasiperiodic imprints on magnetospheric waves by elastic oscillations of the crust.
Copyright and License
© 2025. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
Acknowledgement
The authors are grateful for the discussions with Nils Andersson, Michael Grehan, E. Sterl Phinney, Yuanhong Qu, Alexis Reboul-Salze, Bart Ripperda, and Christopher Thompson. Simulations were performed on DOE NERSC supercomputer Perlmutter under grants m4575 and m5801, which uses resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 using NERSC award NP-ERCAP0028480. E.R.M. acknowledges support by the National Science Foundation under grant No. AST-2307394, from NASA’s ATP program under grant 80NSSC24K1229, as well as on the NSF Frontera supercomputer under grant AST21006, and on Delta at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) through allocation PHY210074 from the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program, which is supported by National Science Foundation grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296. A.B. is supported by a PCTS fellowship and a Lyman Spitzer Jr. fellowship.
Software References
AMReX (W. Zhang et al. 2019), Matplotlib (J. D. Hunter 2007), NumPy (C. R. Harris et al. 2020), SciPy (P. Virtanen et al. 2020), yt (M. J. Turk et al. 2011).
Files
Burnaz_2025_ApJL_995_L57.pdf
Files
(18.9 MB)
| Name | Size | Download all |
|---|---|---|
|
md5:27b2e6c12e1a0addc3d42c15b1ba47ad
|
18.9 MB | Preview Download |
Additional details
Related works
- Is new version of
- Discussion Paper: arXiv:2508.18033 (arXiv)
Funding
- United States Department of Energy
- DE-AC02-05CH11231
- National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
- NP-ERCAP0028480
- National Science Foundation
- AST2307394
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80NSSC24K1229
- National Science Foundation
- AST21006
- Princeton University
Dates
- Submitted
-
2025-09-02
- Accepted
-
2025-11-26
- Available
-
2025-12-15Published