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Astronomers have greeted a mysterious radio burst from space, which repeats regularly for more than 100 days.
Researchers at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Macclesfield spotted the radio burst (FRB 121102), which repeated in a pattern lasting 90 days, followed by a 67-day period of silence.
This month, other telescopes detected new bursts in the same spot – and they’re on schedule, Science Alert reported.
Astronomers have urged observatories to monitor the location to see if it follows its intended pattern, which would mean the bursts would end later this month or early September.
Rapid radio bursts are pulses of radio emission light that last a few milliseconds, but incredibly energetic, detected by telescopes on Earth.
Theories about the causes of bursts range from highly magnetized neutron stars exploded by a nearby supermassive black hole to signatures of technologies developed by advanced civilizations.
Read more: Astronomers move closer to source of mysterious radio bursts from space
Another team from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, detected bursts between 2017 and June 2020 and predicted a “pattern” lasting 161 days, according to a study uploaded to the pre – print arXiv.
Researchers led by Pei Wang of the National Astronomical Observatory of China monitored the location of FRB 121102 between March and July.
On August 17, the team detected 12 bursts from the location.
Wang and his team wrote, “With this putative period, the planned quit date is between August 31 and September 9, 2020.
“Alternatively, if the source is continuously on after the scheduled shutdown time, this suggests that the putative period of the source is not real or has evolved. We encourage more monitoring efforts from other radio observatories. “
Earlier this year, researchers at Jodrell Bank analyzed the “Fast Radio Burst,” or FRB, and found a cycle pattern lasting 157 days.
By analyzing 32 bursts, the researchers noticed bursts observed in a window lasting about 90 days followed by a period of silence of 67 days.
Read more: What are rapid radio bursts and why do they look like aliens?
The presence of a repeating pattern could imply that the powerful bursts are related to the orbital motion of a massive star, neutron star, or black hole.
Dr Kaustubh Rajwade, University of Manchester, who led the July research, said: “This is an exciting result as this is only the second system where we think we are seeing this modulation of activity in gust.
“The detection of a periodicity provides an important constraint on the origin of the bursts and the activity cycles could argue against a precessed neutron star.”
Read more: Telescope detects 100 mysterious radio signals billions of light years away
The existence of FRBs was not discovered until 2007, and they were initially thought to be one-off events related to a cataclysmic event such as an exploding star.
This image partially changed once FRB 121102, originally discovered with the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico on November 2, 2012, repeated itself in 2016.
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