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posted by martyb on Tuesday June 09 2020, @07:15AM   Printer-friendly

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2020, @04:26PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2020, @04:26PM (#1005857)

    What are those [sci-news.com] numbers you reference? Seem kind of off

    Do they? Exactly how?

    I'd point out that the (hypothesized, certainly not proven) anisotropy of the expansion of the universe doesn't invalidate Planck's constant, the speed of light, or any of the other universal constants I linked.

    You're talking out of your ass and it smells that way too. Yuck!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @05:08AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @05:08AM (#1006181)

    1) Establish the isotropic universe is an incorrect assumption
    2) Explain why, for which the answer may be that there is no answer.

    We're still on step 1, with expansion being one possible example. For instance that paper offers some hopeful explanations yet differing rates of expansion could equally well be explained by differences in the speed of light. The reason such hypothesis are not given much weighting is more of a practical than probabilistic reason. If the universe is anisotropic then it not only means that much of everything we thought we've known about the universe was invalid, but it would may be no way to reconcile this issue and get 'back on track' because you'd have no means of comparing like to like.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @07:41PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @07:41PM (#1006548)

      Except you're making an assumption not supported by the paper linked.

      The paper *hypothesized* (didn't prove, or even present any sort of tested theory) that the *expansion rate* of the universe is not *identical* everywhere.

      Claiming that means that *all* of the measured fundamental constants are not goes *way* beyond that.

      Back up your claims with evidence. Occam's Razor applies in spades.