[amsat-bb] A second mysterious repeating fast radio burst has been detected in space

[Roger - W7TZ]

Season 6 Episode 33 of "How the Universe Works" may shed a bit of light on
FRB phenomenon.

73, Roger
W7TZ
CN83ia
Grid Busters
w7tz.webs.com


On Thu, Jan 10, 2019 at 5:34 AM Greg <almetco at comcast.net> wrote:

> In case you missed it. Radio astronomy news.
>
> Greg N3MVF
>
>
> (CNN)Far outside our Milky Way galaxy, something is causing repeating
> short bursts of radio waves to be released into space. Scientists have
> recorded the second repeating fast radio burst to be discovered, according
> to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
>
> The finding was also presented at the 233rd meeting of the American
> Astronomical Society in Seattle.
> These radio bursts are only millisecond-long radio flashes, and such rapid
> bursts themselves aren't rare in space.
> But this is only the second one that has been found to repeat. The mystery
> about why these bursts happen and where they come from continues, which
> always spurs believers to think that advanced extraterrestrial
> civilizations are creating them.
> The first one, deemed FRB 121102, was discovered in 2015 by the Arecibo
> radio telescope, and it was revealed in 2018 that the bursts release an
> enormous amount of energy.
>
> What's sending mysterious repeating fast radio bursts in space?
> This new repeating fast radio burst is called FRB 180814.J0422+73 and was
> recorded six times coming from the same location, 1.5 billion light-years
> away.
> This is one of the very first detections made by the new Canadian Hydrogen
> Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME. The radio telescope was still in
> its pre-commissioning phase and operating with only a small amount of its
> full capacity in the summer of 2018 when it detected this and 12 singular
> fast radio bursts.
> And although this new detection doesn't solve the biggest mysteries
> surrounding the radio bursts, the researchers who recorded it believe that
> other repeating fast radio bursts will be found -- which could allow them
> to figure out where they originate.
> "Knowing that there is another suggests that there could be more out
> there," said Ingrid Stairs, a member of the CHIME team and an
> astrophysicist at the University of British Columbia. "And with more
> repeaters and more sources available for study, we may be able to
> understand these cosmic puzzles -- where they're from and what causes them."
>
> One hypothesis is that powerful astrophysical phenomena are causing them.
> The first repeating fast radio burst was recorded at a frequency of 700
> megahertz, but some of the bursts CHIME recorded were as low as 400
> megahertz.
> "[We now know] the sources can produce low-frequency radio waves and those
> low-frequency waves can escape their environment, and are not too scattered
> to be detected by the time they reach the Earth," Tom Landecker, a CHIME
> team member from the National Research Council of Canada, said in a
> statement. "That tells us something about the environments and the sources.
> We haven't solved the problem, but it's several more pieces in the puzzle."
>
> The low frequency of this new detection could mean that the source of the
> bursts differ. "Scattering" was detected in the fast radio bursts, which is
> a phenomenon that helps determine more about the environment surrounding
> the origin.
> The CHIME team believes this scattering is indicative of powerful
> astrophysical objects at the source of the bursts.
> "That could mean [the source is] in some sort of dense clump like a
> supernova remnant," team member Cherry Ng, an astronomer at the University
> of Toronto, said in a statement. "Or near the central black hole in a
> galaxy. But it has to be in some special place to give us all the
> scattering that we see."
> And if CHIME was able to make these detections before it was even fully up
> and running, the researchers are hopeful that the new radio telescope will
> help them find answers about these mysterious signals.
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