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We Have Spotted 8 More Mysterious Repeating Radio Bursts From Space

Accepted submission by upstart at 2019-08-21 02:43:08
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Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3196

We have spotted 8 more mysterious repeating radio bursts from space [newscientist.com]

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.

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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.

Read more: Fast radio bursts: We’re finally decoding messages from deep space

These new FRBs seem like they will be particularly useful as astronomers try to unravel that mystery. One of them, which CHIME saw repeating ten times over the course of four months, appears to be the closest FRB we’ve ever spotted.

“You want to be able to characterize the galaxy and pinpoint exactly where in the galaxy these bursts are coming from, and that’s impossible if the galaxy is halfway across the universe” says Gregg Hallinan at the California Institute of Technology. “It’s way easier if it’s right in our backyard.”

If we can tell exactly where FRB blasts are coming from, that helps narrow down the field of possibilities as to what is causing them. For example, we expect highly magnetised neutron stars, which are one of the leading theories, to mainly exist in star-forming regions in relatively young galaxies.

“Getting a precise location is really the future of the FRB science game,” says Hallinan. Teams have already started tracking down the home galaxies of CHIME’s new repeaters.

Reference:arxiv.org/abs/1908.03507

More on these topics:

  • cosmology

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