RIAU24.COM – The source of a strong radio signal from outer space has added more mystery to the rapid radio burst, baffling scientists and astronomers around the world.
First reported by ScienceAlert, analysis of data collected on fast radio burst source FRB121102 in 2019 released 1,652 flares in just 47 days, setting the record for the most activity by a fast radio burst source.
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The researchers highlight that it also offers enough detail to perform a thorough search for regular timescales between similar types of bursts, also known as periodicity.
There is no visible sign of periodicity, which the researchers say makes it more difficult to triangulate the source to a rotating solid object, such as a dead magnetic star.
Since they were first discovered in 2007, fast radio bursts have often surprised astronomers. For the uninitiated, these are basically bursts of light in the radio spectrum that shine for only a few milliseconds.
Now using these researchers can trace back to sources with many coming from galaxies that are millions, if not billions of light years away, and they are still very powerful despite such short time spans. In fact, they can release the power of hundreds of millions of suns.
Often such bursts flash once and then disappear as if they didn’t exist, making it impossible to trace back to their source. So scientists never really know what actually causes them.
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Recent detections in the Milky Way hint strongly toward a neutron star dubbed a magnetar. And a bunch of sources of fast radio bursts have been detected repeatedly that could help solve some of the mystery.
The first and most prominent is the FRB121102. Its repetition helped astronomers trace it to a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years away. Moreover, it is the most active and its activity occurs on a 90 day cycle with 67 days of silence.
This allowed FRB121102 to be seen in action several times in a row. However, recent detections made using the Five-hundred-meter Spherical Aperture Radio Telescope (FAST) are quite astonishing.
While the telescope was being commissioned – during August 29, 2019, and October 29, 2019 – it captured 1,652 individual explosions over a span of 59.5 hours.
The peak burst rate was 122 over a one-hour time span, which is also considered the highest activity level seen from the FRBS. This detection paves the way for statistical analysis of source activity. According to the researchers, the bursts can be categorized into two types – higher energy and lower energy bursts – each exhibiting different properties and the weaker ones being more random.
The data also describe the periodicity of bursts between 1 millisecond and 1000 seconds. It is known that the magnetar has a rate of rotation in this time period. Had the bursts been caused by mechanisms on the star’s surface, they should have appeared periodically. But the data show no such sign, which suggests that magnetars are not the only source of FRBs.
In addition, there is considerable variation in burst pattern, strength, duration, repetition and polarization, indicating that they can originate from very different types of environments, between sources.
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