2023-12-15 20:19:58
Since detecting them around fifteen years ago, astronomers have continued to discover destabilizing characteristics of what they call fast radio bursts. They still don’t know what their origin is. But they may finally have an instrument that could lift the secret.
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[EN VIDÉO] Repetitive fast radio bursts The origin of fast radio bursts — or Fast Radio Burst (FRB) — remains mysterious. Some…
Since their discovery a few years ago now, those that astronomers call fast radio bursts – or FRBs for Fast Radio Bursts — intrigue. They correspond to flashes, as brief as they are intense, of radio waves coming from deep space. Most of them only happen once. But some repeat themselves. And that adds a little more to the mystery surrounding the origin of these rapid radio bursts.
A rapid radio burst like no other
A team from the Seti Institute (United States) studied in more detail one of these fast repetitive radio bursts, FRB 20220912 A. They report in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, that during the course of some 540 hours of observations, they noted no less than 35 occurrences of the fast radio burst. Enough to lead researchers to qualify it as “highly active”.
Seti Institute astronomers explain that, as with most repeating FRBs, FRB 20220912A’s bursts tended to drift from high to low frequencies. But what they had never observed before was a notable drop in the central frequency of bursts over the two months of observation. And no existing model of magnetars, neutron star collisions or white dwarf mergers — the main candidates for the origins of fast radio bursts — can explain these properties.
More questions than answers on the mystery of fast radio bursts
To further add to the mystery, the researchers report that no pattern could be found in the time between bursts. But they continue to hope that theAllen Telescope Array (ATA), the instrument with which they carried out this work and which has the ability to record many frequency channels at the same time, will help them obtain valuable data that will ultimately help shed light on the origin of FRBs.
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