An artist's impression of a Gamma Ray Burst jet over time, and the small patches of magnetic fields present, as revealed by new research.
Credit Dr Kitty Yeung.
Astronomers make first detection of polarised radio waves in Gamma Ray Burst jets.
The polarisation signature reveals magnetic fields in the universe's most powerful explosions to be much more patchy and tangled than first thought.
The research team, from the University of Bath, Northwestern University, the Open University of Israel, Harvard University, California State University in Sacramento, the Max Planck Institute in Garching, and Liverpool John Moores University discovered that only 0.8% of the jet light was polarised, meaning that jet’s magnetic field was only ordered over relatively small patches – each less than about 1% of the diameter of the jet. Larger patches would have produced more polarised light.