Astronomers watched 35 explosive outbursts from a rare repeating “fast radio burst” (FRB) because it shifted in frequency like a “cosmic slide whistle,” blinking in a puzzling pattern never seen before.
FRBs are millisecond-long flashes of sunshine from beyond the Milky Way which are capable of manufacturing as much energy in a couple of seconds as the sun does in a yr. FRBs are believed to come from powerful objects like neutron stars with intense magnetic fields — also called magnetars — or from cataclysmic events like stellar collisions or the collapse of neutron stars to form black holes. Complicating the FRB picture, a couple of FRBs are “repeaters” that flash from the identical spot within the sky greater than once, while the bulk burst once after which vanish.
The team behind the brand new research used the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array (ATA) to check the highly lively repeating FRB often called FRB 20220912A. As they watched the FRB over 541 hours (nearly 23 days), the team saw its bursts of radiation cover a big selection of frequencies within the radio wave region of the electromagnetic spectrum, which eventually developed into a captivating pattern that astronomers had never seen before.
The brand new data could finally help unravel the mystery of where deep-space FRBs come from and why a small minority of those rapid and intense blasts of radiation repeat.
“This work is exciting since it provides each confirmation of known FRB properties and the invention of some recent ones,” lead study creator Sofia Sheikh, a postdoctoral fellow on the SETI Institute, said in a press release. “We’re narrowing down the source of FRBs, for instance, to extreme objects similar to magnetars, but no existing model can explain the entire properties which were observed up to now.”
The findings were accepted for publication within the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and a replica is on the market to read on arXiv.org.
Patterns and chaos in fast radio bursts
Sheikh and colleagues found that the bursts of radiation from FRB 20220912A shifted down in frequency, and when converted to notes played on a xylophone, this shift appeared like a slide whistle’s descending toot — a behavior that scientists had never seen before from an FRB. This also helped the team discover that there’s a cutoff point for the brightness of bursts from FRB 20220912A, revealing how much of the general cosmic signal rate this FRB is chargeable for.
While there was a noticeable pattern within the frequency of FRB 20220912A’s bursts, there was no clear pattern to how long these bursts lasted or how much time passed between them. This shows there’s an inherent unpredictability in repeating FRBs.
As well as, the study demonstrated how SETI’s ATA — a telescope designed to hunt for radio signals from potential alien intelligence — has a very important contribution to make to the study of FRBs and, due to this fact, a number of the universe’s most extreme events and objects.
“It has been wonderful to be a part of the primary FRB study done with the ATA — this work proves that recent telescopes with unique capabilities, just like the ATA, can provide a unique approach on outstanding mysteries in FRB science,” Sheikh said.