A team of astronomers recently detected a fast radio that persists about 1,000 times more than average and has a clear periodic pattern. The radio explosion is a new eclectic addition to the list of mysterious radio signals emanating from various sources in the universe.
Rapid bursts of radio are fleeting pulses of radio waves, the sources of which remain unknown. All known bursts came from beyond the Milky Way until 2020, when the CHIME radio telescope discovered a signal that appeared to come from our galactic neighborhood.
The new fast radio explosion, detected in December 2019 and called FRB 20191221A, comes from a source billions of light years away and was also observed by CHIME. Unlike most fast radio bursts, which last a few milliseconds, the recent burst lasted three seconds. The signal analysis from a research team was published this week in Nature.
“Not only was it very long … but there were periodic peaks that were remarkably accurate, emitting every fraction of a second (boom, boom, boom) like a heartbeat,” said Daniele Michilli, an MIT astrophysicist. and co-author of the study, in a statement from the institute. “This is the first time the signal itself is periodic.”
Depending on the frequency of the explosion, researchers think it comes from a distant neutron star. Neutron stars are the collapsed remains of dead stars and are some of the densest objects in the universe.
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Some rotating neutron stars have very strong magnetic fields and are called pulsars or magnets, depending on the intensity of these fields. As the stars rotate rapidly, they emit electromagnetic radiation, which reaches the Earth in the form of radio waves.
Pulsars are useful for studying gravitational waves because their reliable pulses of light come from their pulses and can be timed with extreme precision. Scientists use the time differences of the pulsars to determine if the space-time tissue has deformed.
Rapid bursts of radio are often due to the activity of these extreme objects. While FRB 20191221A is no exception to this rule, it is rare even for fast burst standards due to its consistency.
“There aren’t many things in the universe that emit strictly periodic signals,” Michilli said. “The examples we know of in our own galaxy are radio pulsars and magnets, which rotate and produce a beacon-like ray emission. And we think this new signal could be a magnet or a pulsar with steroids.”
Hopefully, FRB 20191221A will remain more consistent than its enigmatic brothers. In October 2021, a different team of astronomers reported a radio signal that appeared to be launching to Earth from near the center of the Milky Way, but when they trained more instruments at the source, he remained silent.
David Kaplan, co-author of this article and astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told Gizmodo at the time that sometimes magnetic fields can become entangled, causing an otherwise coherent pulse of radio signals. , becomes intermittent or silent.
According to the MIT statement, FRB 20191221A appears to be more than a million times brighter than the radio broadcasts of pulsars and magnets in the Milky Way. If the radio source continues to have bursts, the team may be able to better understand the origins of the enigmatic bursts.
More information: A strange radio signal from the galactic center has baffled astronomers