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A huge haul of fast radio bursts (FRBs) can help astronomers finally start to get a handle on these mysterious and powerful blasts from deep space.
A new study reports the detection of 19 previously undiscovered FRBs, including the closest one to Earth and the brightest one ever seen. The results boost the total tally significantly; just three dozen or so FRBs had been known previously, with the first detection coming in 2007.
FRBs are brief (millisecond-long) heavy-duty emissions of radio light, which can be said to be much more expensive. Their source is the topic of much discussion and debate. For example, some researchers have suggested that FRBs could be generated by advanced alien civilizations, though most astronomers favor natural explanations, such as fast-spinning neutron stars. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens]
The new study is led by Ryan Shannon, of the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. Since the beginning of 2017, he and his team have been researching the skies for the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a network of 36 radio dishes in Western Australia.
The system has been published in the journal Nature, 20 FRBs, the researchers report in the new paper, which was published online today (Oct. (One of the bursts they spotted was reported previously in a different paper, so the count of newfound FRBs technically stands at 19.)
This study is co-authored by Keith Bannister of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia's national science agency, which is designed and engineered ASKAP.
"The telescope has a whopping field of view of 30 square degrees, 100 times larger than the full moon," Bannister said in a statement.
"And, by using the telescope's dish antennas in a radical way, with each pointing at a different part of the sky, we observed 240 square degrees all at once – about 1,000 times the area of the full moon," he added. "ASKAP is astoundingly good for this work. "
An artist's illustration of an ASKAP radio dish detecting a fast radio burst (FRB). Scientists do not know what causes FRBs, but it must involve incredible energy – equivalent to the amount released by the sun in 80 years.
Credit: OzGrav, Swinburne University of Technology
The team's analyzes show "that fast radio is coming from the other side of the universe rather than from our own galactic neighborhood," Shannon added in the same statement.
FRB 171020, which originated about 425 million light-years away from our planet. Shannon told Space.com.
And the ASKAP survey has been discovered to be the most powerful one, said Shannon, who is also affiliated with the Australian Research Council's Center for Excellence in Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav).
FRB-harboring fields still and more than 12,000 hours following up FRB finds, Shannon said.
Indeed, to date, just one "repeater" has been confirmed – a source called FRB 121102, which has been published several times since its 2012 discovery, including a barrage of at least 93 over the course of a single day in August 2017.
Shannon said: "Are there two classes of FRB sources? The differences between the repeater and the others are becoming too hard to ignore."
There's another important implication of the new study, he added. The ASKAP FRBs are brighter than previous detections, and they feature lower "dispersion." Dispersion refers to the spreading or smearing of the different wavelengths that make up a burst – basically, how much these various wavelengths have been slowed down by intervening material on their way from the FRB source to Earth.
"The fact that there is a relationship between brightness and dispersion that is the product of the dispersion is outside of galaxies," said Shannon told Space.com via email. "This means that we can use this technique, which is almost impossible to observe using other techniques (optical, X-ray observations, for example)."
In the future, Shannon and colleagues at the FRBs further. They should be able to go to each other's galaxy, the researchers said.
As its name indicates, ASKAP is a pathfinder for the Kilometer Array Square (SKA), a huge network of radio dishes across Australia and South Africa that is scheduled to take shape over the next few years. The SKA may end up finding many more FRBs, study team members said.
Mike Wall's book on the search for alien life, "Out There"will be published on Nov. 13 by Grand Central Publishing. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us @Spacedotcom gold Facebook. Originally published on Space.com.
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