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Jodrell Bank leads international effort which reveals 157 day cycle in unusual cosmic radio bursts
An investigation into one of the current great mysteries of astronomy has come to the fore thanks to a four-year observing campaign conducted at the Jodrell Bank Observatory.
Using the long-term monitoring capabilities of the iconic Lovell Telescope, an international team led by Jodrell Bank astronomers has been studying an object known as a repeating Fast Radio Burst (FRB), which emits very short duration bright radio pulses.
Using the 32 bursts discovered during the campaign, in conjunction with data from previously published observations, the team has discovered that emission from the FRB known as 121102 follows a cyclic pattern, with radio bursts observed in a window lasting approximately 90 days followed by a silent period of 67 days. The same behaviour then repeats every 157 days.
This discovery provides an important clue to identifying the origin of these enigmatic fast radio bursts. The presence of a regular sequence in the burst activity could imply that the powerful bursts are linked to the orbital motion of a massive star, a neutron star or a black hole.
[...] In a new paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the team confirm that FRB 121102 is only the second repeating source of FRBs to display such periodic activity. To their surprise, the timescale for this cycle is almost 10 times longer than the 16-day periodicity exhibited by the first repeating source, FRB 180916.J10158+56, which was recently discovered by the CHIME telescope in Canada.
Journal Reference:
Rajwade, K M, Mickaliger, M B, Stappers, B W, et al. Possible periodic activity in the repeating FRB 121102, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staa1237)
Previously: A Fast Radio Burst Tracked Down to a Nearby Galaxy
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2020, @03:56PM
Interestingly enough though this wouldn't actually matter. Because it's a ratio of 90:67. No matter whether you use a shorter or longer time frame, you'd have the exact same minimized ratio.
Actually what is really kind of weird is that (90 + 67) * 2 = 314. Granted again you could argue that I'm assuming base 10 and that really is a big assumption, but base 10 is much more than just our number of fingers - it makes math vastly easier. And similarly convenient bases are just multiples of it. So I think it's highly likely that most intelligent species would eventually converge on base 10 meaning both 157 and 3.14 would have major relevance. One's a coincidence, and two is a coincidence as well.. but was kind of freaky realizing that (90+67) * 2 = 314!