Astronomers find 8 repeated radio bursts from deep space

The universe is full of mystery, but few of them are as perplexed as fast radio (FRB). These far-reaching and very energetic radio-frequency flashes were only discovered in 2007 and most of the observations come from non-repetitive sources. This makes it difficult to study the phenomenon in detail. Astronomers knew only a few signals repeated before, but a team of researchers reported the discovery of eight other repeated FRBs that could help us understand what is happening.

The first recorded FRBs took place in 2001, but no one spotted them in the data until a review in 2007. As the name suggests, the fast bursts of radio only last one year. millisecond and the signal on Earth is tiny – it looks like a cell phone. call from the moon. However, the sources are incredibly intense to be visible on Earth. Astronomers believe that the FRB releases as much energy in a millisecond as the sun in 80 years.

Although dozens of FRBs have appeared in the data since this first signal, there has been only a handful of repeated sources. The first of them is known as FRB 121102. He was alone until the beginning of this year when astronomers discovered two other repetitive FRBs. The new study (available on the arXiv pre-print service) from McGill University lists eight other repeating FRBs.

Researchers used the radio telescope from the Canadian hydrogen intensity mapping experiment (above) to search for FRBs. They observed six new FRBs that only repeated once and one that triggered three bursts. The last one has some particularly excited scientists. Currently called FRB 180916.J0158 + 65, this source has released ten fast bursts of radio for four months of observations.

It has been suggested that all BRAs may repeat themselves, but the time between flashes varies greatly. One of the newly identified repeaters will flash every two or three days, but other sources may spill years between two signals. To help solve this mess, the McGill University team compared the new repeaters to non-repetitive FRB signals. They discovered that repeaters and singles had similar "dispersion measures," which describe how the signal stretches when it travels in the universe. However, bursts of repeaters tend to be a few milliseconds longer than singles, and they sometimes release smaller sub-gusts after the main one.

Knowing where the FRBs will occur helps scientists steer the instruments in the right direction to collect as much data as possible. Dominant assumptions suggest FRB mechanisms such as energetic supernovae and magnetized neutron star emissions known as magnetars, but no one knows for sure. With more FRB sources repeated and confirmed, we could finally get closer to an answer.

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