Astronomers at the U.S. National Astronomical Radio Observatory have discovered that a fast radio (FRB), FRB190520, first discovered in 2019, shares a strange feature with just another FRB of more than 500 ‘have discovered so far. Their findings are expected to shed new light on the origins of these mysterious cosmic phenomena.
Fast radio bursts are exactly what the name implies: an intense but short-lived burst of energy on the radio spectrum. What intensity and short duration are we talking about here? Try to emit as much energy in a couple of milliseconds as the Sun does in three days for size!
FRBs are a relatively new area of study: the first was only discovered in 2007, it was hidden in radio telescope data that had been collected in 2001, and scientists had never observed a “in alive “(or rather, seeing the resulting glow). until a team at the Parkes Observatory in Australia did exactly that in 2015. As such, much is still unknown about them, especially what really causes them.
Various points of origin have been raised for FRBs, such as neutron stars, gamma-ray bursts, black holes, stellar and magnetic collisions, a subset of magnetically supercharged neutron stars, but scientists still they must determine a precise cause.
It may even be that more than one type of cosmological object or event can cause the phenomenon, mostly because while most FRBs seem like one-off events, some are repeated in a regular, predictable cycle. This is where FRB190520 comes into play.
Like most bursts, FRB190520 was discovered by crawling through archived data from the telescope: the explosion occurred on May 19, 2019, but was not “lived” until November of that year. But astronomers soon realized that this was one of the rarest classes of “repeaters”; what has only recently been discovered is that among these regular high-energy bursts, what is causing FRB190520 is also the source of constant, much lower-energy radio emissions, a feature it only shares with FRB121102.
Scientists now hope that by studying the differences between these two FRBs and all the others, they can learn more about the origins of the phenomenon.
“The FRB field is moving very fast right now and new discoveries are coming out every month. However, there are still big questions left, and this object gives us challenging clues about those questions,” said Sarah Burke-Spolaor of WVU.
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