Scientists Draw The Best Portraits Of The Nearest Known Fast Radio Bursts

Scientists have unveiled a more detailed description of perhaps the most famous recurring fast radio burst, a mysterious phenomenon that astronomers have yet to explain.

Astronomers first saw this rapid radio explosion in 2018, more than a decade after the first discovery of the FRB, known as the FRB20180916B. Although some FRBs have light flashes at night, some have rhythmic flashes again; This particular FRB subsequently bursts for four days and then cools down. It is the closest FRB found by scientists at 500 million light-years away.

This is due to the frequent approach, two teams of researchers have recently reported.

A European team identified dozens of samples created by the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) and the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) and examined the wavelengths of radio waves produced by the FRB (Fast Radio Burst). The researchers were able to identify some wavelengths emitted from FRB20180916B using LOFAR that was three times longer (with three times lower frequencies) than previously observed emissions from the same fast radio burst (FRB).

A physicist at McGill University in Canada and lead author of the new study, Ziggy Pleunis said in a statement. "

That said, this particularly long wavelength of the fast radio burst (FRB) took longer to cover the vast distance from the source of the FRB to the Earth's detector. For each rhythmic explosion, LOFAR detects long wavelengths for three days, after which CHIME detects shorter wavelengths.

Daniele Michilli, co-author of the study, and McGill, another physicist, said in the same statement:

This second new research paper on FRB is based on observations collected by the European Very-long-baseline Interferometery network. The study studied how light in each vibration changes over time, using a feature of light called convection, encoded between four explosions of the fast radio burst (FRB)

Previous studies have shown that the vibrations of the FRB vary from 30 milliseconds or one-millionth of a second. But new research shows that at least for this particular FRB, some aspects of the signal last only a few microseconds, while other features are seen on a longer scale.

Scientists hope that these new observations could narrow the range of theories behind the causes of FRB. In particular, researchers in the first study suggested that their research points to a scene where a magnetic superdense dead star called a magnetar interacts with a large nearby star 10 times heavier than the mass of our Sun. In that case, the FRB is produced as a flow of charged particles flowing from nearby stars "combs" through a magnetically controlled area around the magnet.

Whether this theory exists will depend on future observations of FRB20180916B.

The study was published in the March 22 issue of Nature Astronomy and the April 9 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.