A New Mystery Signal Is Repeating From a Distant Galaxy, And It’s a Weird One

Last Update: June 11, 2022 at 12:08 am

DATE:  June 10, 2022

SOURCE: MSN News

 

 

A New Mystery Signal Is Repeating From a Distant Galaxy, And It’s a Weird One

A newly discovered source of repeating fast radio bursts has deepened the mystery of what, precisely, could be producing these powerful outbursts.

 

The source, first detected in 2019 and named FRB 190520B, seems to be frequently spitting out millisecond bursts of powerful radio waves.

This has allowed astronomers to perform analyses that reveal information about where it comes from in the Universe, and the space around it. Those analyses suggest that there is probably more than one mechanism in the big wide cosmos capable of producing these strange outbursts.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs), as the name suggests, are very fast bursts of radiation (lasting only milliseconds in duration) that flare brightly in radio wavelengths.

Most of them come from other galaxies (only one source has been detected in the Milky Way), and they’re extremely bright, discharging as much energy in an instant as 500 million Suns.

Most of these outbursts have only been detected once: They come out of nowhere, burst once, then we never see them again. This makes them largely impossible to predict, and very difficult to trace and study.

But a few sources (well, three now) have been detected repeating, and they offer a tantalizing opportunity to understand what’s going on. Maybe.

The FRB detected in the Milky Way came from a type of dead star called a magnetar, which suggests that at least some FRBs are caused by magnetar eruptions. But there are still a lot of unknowns.

“Are those that repeat different from those that don’t?” says astrophysicist Kshitij Aggarwal from West Virginia University.

The discovery signal from FRB 190520B arrived at Earth in May of 2019, detected by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in China, and found in the data in November of that year.

Follow-up observations of the location in the sky revealed that the source was repeating.

 

FULL STORY:  A New Mystery Signal Is Repeating From a Distant Galaxy, And It’s a Weird One (msn.com)