Scientists intercepted a message from space
The signal is coming from an alien galaxy
An unusually strong burst of radio waves that has been traveling through space for more than 8 billion years is proving difficult to explain using current scientific theories.
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Where does the signal come from?
An international team of scientists detected the fast radio burst using the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescopes. The event named FRB 20220610A is interesting for several reasons.
Not only did the flash travel a significantly longer distance than most FRBs recorded to date, but it was also incredibly energetic—up to 3.5 times the maximum ever determined; in a fraction of a second it released as much energy as the Sun produces in 30 years.
However, the analysis showed something else. The measurement of the dispersion of wavelengths, referred to as the dispersion measure, also did not match expectations. Many FRBs have been recorded since 2007, making these millisecond bursts of radio waves ideal subjects for investigation. Most of them are one-off, but some of them repeat in a way that resembles the tremors of an earthquake.
Since the beginning of FRB research, magnetars have been among the main suspects. A magnetar is a neutron star with an extremely strong magnetic field. When a supernova collapses into a neutron star, the strength of its magnetic field increases dramatically.
This would explain why FRBs are able to emit extreme amounts of energy in the blink of an eye. “Nevertheless, it is also necessary to take into account the light intensity limit that the latest observations exceed,” the researchers said in a study published in the journal the journal Science.
Source: Gontran Isnard / Unsplash
We can use FRBs to measure the “missing” matter between galaxies
The brightness of FRB 20220610A does not match current scientific models, which assume that the bursts of radio waves are produced when high-velocity particles associated with neutron star eruptions collide with the surrounding stellar wind. The observation also contradicts theories about how light travels through intergalactic space.
“Light that travels through absolute emptiness moves at record speed. All this changes when its waves pass through an electromagnetic field, with different wavelengths of light interacting with the field in subtly different ways,” the study says.
“Likewise, gas and dust floating in the interstellar and intergalactic vacuum carry their own faint electromagnetic ‘buzz’ that causes wavelengths to slow down at different rates as they radiate through them.”
Finding distant FRBs is key to accurately measuring the amount of missing matter in the universe, as cosmologist Jean-Pierre Macquart has shown. “Macquart showed that the more distant the radio burst, the more rare matter it detects; this relationship is called the Macquart relationship,” says researcher Ryan Shannon.
The Macquart relation holds for most FRBs, but does not apply to FRB 20220610A, meaning that further investigation is needed to understand the fast radio signals. Despite their origin, FRBs are ubiquitous. However, none of the theories proposed so far can fully explain all the properties of these radio signals.
Preview photo source: Chalmers University of Technology, source: the journal Science
2023-10-21 12:31:00
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