SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @02:20AM (5 children)
The signals are coming from billions of light years away so thats not possible. Also the signals are coming from a very strong source as powerful as a star, unlikely to be artificial. Likely its just some star related emission that we don't understand.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @04:03AM (3 children)
It was a joke, man.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @04:06AM (2 children)
Our first signal into space was Hitler, man. The aliens are Nazis who are telling us they made the universe great again by killing all the space Jews.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @10:46AM (1 child)
Ah, what the hell....nope,
Tesla (of course...) Marconi and others flagged our existence to anyone listening long before Hitler, even if you wanted to restrict it to TV signals, then Baird's experiments again came first...
Alien Nazis?, I'm more worried about the Interstellar Pigeon Invasion Fleet on their way to answer Tesla's hails...
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday August 22 2019, @04:48PM
The 1936 Olympic Games broadcast was the first one transmitted with sufficient power to escape Earth's atmosphere. Unless you're assuming UFOs mean the aliens were already on Earth with listening equipment...but in that case why are we even having this conversation, because they'd've been watching everything already?
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2013/09/will-hitler-be-the-first-person-that-aliens-see.html [realclearscience.com]
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @07:14AM
These bursts are vastly more energetic than an average star. A millisecond long fast radio burst is driven by as much energy as the entire sun generates in 80 years. [space.com] Keep in mind the orders of magnitude we're speaking of there. That's 1 millisecond versus 80 years from a [relatively] tiny source region. Whatever is powering them is far beyond the capabilities of an average star. That's why the suspects including things like black holes, or little green men.