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
Related Stories
A fast radio burst tracked down to a nearby galaxy:
In results published in the January 9 edition of Nature, the European VLBI Network (EVN) used eight telescopes spanning locations from the United Kingdom to China to simultaneously observe the repeating radio source known as FRB 180916.J0158+65. Using a technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), the researchers achieved a level of resolution high enough to localize the FRB to a region approximately seven light years across -- a feat comparable to an individual on Earth being able to distinguish a person on the Moon.
With that level of precision, the research team was able to train an optical telescope onto the location to learn more about the environment from which the burst emanated. What they found has added a new chapter to the mystery surrounding the origins of FRBs.
"We used the eight-metre Gemini North telescope in Hawaii to take sensitive images that showed the faint spiral arms of a Milky-Way-like galaxy and showed that the FRB source was in a star-forming region in one of those arms," said co-author Shriharsh Tendulkar, a former McGill University postdoctoral researcher who co-led the optical imaging and spectroscopic analyses of the FRB's location.
[...] "The FRB is among the closest yet seen and we even speculated that it could be a more conventional object in the outskirts of our own galaxy," said co-author Mohit Bhardwaj, a McGill University doctoral student and CHIME team member.
"However the EVN observation proved that it's in a relatively nearby galaxy, making it still a puzzling FRB, but close enough to now study using many other telescopes."
A repeating fast radio burst source localized to a nearby spiral galaxy$, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1866-z)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @07:38AM (1 child)
Relax, it's easy once you break their encryption and toss back a Pepsi.
It's a book called, "TO SERVE MAN [wikipedia.org]."
On the last page there's a flyer for humans to sign up for private tours on their home planet!
What's not to like?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @09:18AM
Nah, they're just reporting back about their recent shipment from N/\S/\ of all the coronavirus bodies sent for "experimentation" purposes.
Why else do you go to space than to trade with the aliens?
Although, according to one video by Terry Davis, TempleOS was meant to be a "space alien trading post." In another two videos, he mentioned he had had a "space alien."
So according to King Terry, TempleOS is all you need! You're not communing with "God", you're communing with aliens!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @12:20PM (8 children)
This is absolute proof of alien civilization since all naturally occurring fast radio bursts are non-prime.
(Score: 4, Touché) by takyon on Tuesday June 09 2020, @01:10PM (7 children)
"What the hell is a 'day'?"
-Alien
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Tuesday June 09 2020, @01:20PM (5 children)
"What the spa fon is 'helll'?"
--Another alien.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @02:07PM (4 children)
6.67430(15)×10−11m3kg-1s-2 [wikipedia.org]
6.62607015×10−34Js [wikipedia.org]
299,792,458m/s [wikipedia.org]
9.1093837015(28)×10−31kg [wikipedia.org]
1.602176634×10−19 C [wikipedia.org]
atomic mass/number [wikipedia.org]
etc., etc., etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2020, @03:45PM (3 children)
What are those [sci-news.com] numbers you reference? Seem kind of off.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2020, @04:26PM (2 children)
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)
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
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.
(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!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @06:21PM
Keep it up and we will even forgive you for your role in killing The Doctor!