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posted by janrinok on Thursday August 22 2019, @12:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the can-you-hear-me-now? dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3196

We have spotted 8 more mysterious repeating radio bursts from space

Weird blasts from space called fast radio bursts are some of the most mysterious phenomena in the universe, and now astronomers have spotted eight new and particularly unusual ones, including one that may be the closest we've ever seen.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are flashes of radio waves that come from distant space and last just a few milliseconds. Many hypotheses have been put forward about what may be causing them, but none of them is a perfect fit.

What makes that even more difficult is that there seem to be two types of FRBs: bursts that happen just once, and bursts that repeat many times from the same spot in space. Up until now, we had only detected two so-called repeaters, but the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) has found eight more.

Finding repeaters is important because they are much easier to study than bursts that only occur once. "Repeaters are nice because you can follow them up and observe the source for a long time and see if there are any changes, which can give us clues about what the emission mechanism could be," says CHIME team member Shriharsh Tendulkar at McGill University in Montreal.

That's why the first repeater, FRB 121102, was also the first FRB that we tracked back to its home galaxy. Most of the ideas we have to explain repeaters are based on FRB 121102, but these new ones seem to be different. Their radio waves do not show signs of being scrambled by a turbulent environment like the first repeater. Also, FRB 121102 sits in the same spot as another source of radio waves that glows constantly, whereas none of the newly discovered repeating signals do.

"This demonstrates that there is a vast diversity even in what the repeaters are," says Tendulkar. "Maybe some of them are older, some of them have stronger magnetic fields, they're in different environments." It has been suggested that repeaters and non-repeaters may have different origins, but maybe there are a multitude of ways to produce FRBs instead of just two.

Reference:arxiv.org/abs/1908.03507


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @01:08AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @01:08AM (#883397)

    FTL points. Whether some form of spatial jump, wormhole, or fixed emplacement jumpgate. the close together bursts are groups of ships, the single bursts are either exploratory vessels, return traffic after a gate is built, or low traffic jump points.

    The alternative of course is that they are just some weird interstellar phenomena, ranging from stars reacting to other space-time events we are not clearly aware of, to semi-sentient transmissions between stars used to communicate as part of a larger network.

    Alien navigation beacons might not be that far off either, but only if either a peaceful confederation exists, or an individual species is colonizing the stars and believes itself alone. Otherwise any sane sufficiently advanced starfaring species would have more common sense than to advertise itself in case an unknown alien species used their own beacons to track them and exterminate/invade them.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @03:58AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @03:58AM (#883458)

    Why would sufficiently advanced FTL capable people use primitive lightspeed radio for navigation? That would be like choosing RFC 1149 IP over Avian Carriers for your home internet connection.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @07:24AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @07:24AM (#883503)

      A sci-fi wormhole type system would enable 'faster than light' travel without actually being perceived as going faster than light since you are effectively reducing the perceived distances, not increasing your perceived speed. The point of this is that it may ultimately not be possible for anything to propagate faster than the speed of light, and so beacons that propagate at the speed of light would be as good as it gets.