Astronomers detect first regular fast radio bursts with origins unknown
Our home in space
Scientists have detected a strange repeating rhythm of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) emanating from an unknown source outside our galaxy.
The said galaxy seems to be 500 million light-years away from Earth.
FRBs are short, intense flashes of radio waves that are thought to be the product of small, distant, extremely dense objects. It has not been made clear by science as to what those objects might be.
FRBs typically last a few milliseconds, during which time they can outshine entire galaxies.
Astronomers have catalogued over 100 FRBs since 2007 from distant sources scattered across the universe, outside our own galaxy.
They have now started to find bursts repeating in a pattern, where they seem to switch off and on in a predictable pattern. The latest discovery, published in the journal Nature, sends out random bursts of radio waves over a four-day window, and then goes quiet for 12 days, before beginning again.
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Researchers watched the bursts for more than 500 days, noting that the 16-day pattern occurred consistently over that time, making it the most definitive pattern yet seen.
The latest FRBs were picked up by CHIME, that was the first to pick up signals of the new periodic FRB source.
From September 2018 to February 2020, CHIME picked out 38 fast radio bursts from a single source, FRB 180916. J0158+65, which the astronomers traced to a star-churning region on the outskirts of a massive spiral galaxy, 500 million light-years from Earth.
The researchers noted that the blasts could also be the result of a binary system such as a neutron star orbiting around another neutron star or black hole. The pattern could be the result of the orbit between, and the interaction between the two objects, which would explain their regular pattern.