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BURSTS of radio waves flashing across the sky seem to follow a mathematical pattern. If the pattern is real, either some strange celestial physics is going on, or the bursts are artificial, produced by human – or alien – technology.
Telescopes have been picking up so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs) since 2001. They last just a few milliseconds and erupt with about as much energy as the sun releases in a month. Ten have been detected so far, most recently in 2014, when the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, caught a burst in action for the first time. The others were found by sifting through data after the bursts had arrived at Earth. No one knows what causes them, but the brevity of the bursts means their source has to be small – hundreds of kilometers across at most – so they can't be from ordinary stars. And they seem to come from far outside the galaxy.
The weird part is that they all fit a pattern that doesn't match what we know about cosmic physics.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by inertnet on Thursday April 02 2015, @09:54AM
TFA says that low frequencies arrive here with a multiple of 187.5 second delay after the high frequencies from the same event. They use this information to roughly calculate distance traveled. Could relativity around an even horizon around a black hole also cause such delays in frequency 'release'? For example, if the spinning axis of a black hole is pointed directly at us, something falling into the black hole might cause radio waves to be emitted along this axis, but of course with a delay. We cannot see the material falling in, we just see the effect it has on one pole of the black hole. Could that be an explanation?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2015, @12:45PM
No. Relativity affects all frequencies the same way.
However, a different (non-dark) matter distribution might make a difference: This delay is caused by dispersion due to the matter between us and the event; if the matter is distributed differently than we think, the index of refraction and thus the dispersion will also be different. Underestimating the density of interstellar matter would probably cause overestimation of the distance (and thus also of the total power) of those events.
(Score: 1) by inertnet on Thursday April 02 2015, @08:35PM
Yes, but the problem with that is that all these events would originate at only 5 or so different distances that are all mathematically linked, but their direction is random as far as we know. That's about as likely as them being side effects of wormholes being opened by some spaceship.