Is the Milky Way Sending Earth A Message? Scientists Now Close to Uncovering This Strange Signal

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are the hot topic in astronomy right now. Knowing where they specifically come from, either the Milky Way galaxy or beyond, could help scientists further understand how the universe works.

For instance, the fast radio burst signal that two-ground-based radio telescopes detected on April 28, 2020, has caused quite a stir among astronomers as they struggled to pinpoint its origin in the Milky Way galaxy.

It is the closest fast radio burst to the Earth, which is only 30,000 light-years away firmly in the Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers said that it is impossible to miss it even though it only lasted a millisecond. But they have come close now to unraveling its mysterious origins.

Strange Signal Coming from the Milky Way Galaxy

The strange signal coming from the Milky Way galaxy was detected by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) and the Survey for Transient Astronomical Radio Emission 2 (STARE2).

Kiyoshi Masui, assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that the signal was detected by CHIME even though the radio telescope was not looking in the right direction. While the STARE2 detected it despite only having a set of few radio antennae that are made out of cake pans.

Space.com reported that it was the first fast radio burst detected outside of the Milky Way galaxy as previous fast radio bursts were mostly detected billions of light-years away, which makes them harder to study. More so, the strange signal was also noted by astronomers as the most energetic radio burst that they have ever recorded in the galaxy.

Knowledge from previous FRB detections has helped astronomers to pinpoint the origins of the strange signal from the Milky Way galaxy. The signal adds to the growing body of knowledge about fast radio bursts that could hopefully shed light on future radio blasts.

Evidence suggests that this signal is likely to be a magnetar, a young neutron star born from the members of a supernova that has a magnetic field strength of 5,000 trillion times of Earth, which makes them the most powerful magnets in the entire universe.

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Mysterious Signals from Other Galaxies

Fast radio bursts are intense blasts of radio emission that only last for milliseconds and behave like the dispersion sweep of radio pulsars, Swinburne Astronomy Online. The first FRB was detected in 2007 by Duncan Lorimer and David Narkevic, who were studying data taken by the Parkes radio dish in Australia. The FRB is also sometimes called the Lorimer Burst.

As mentioned, most fast radio bursts came from other galaxies. The famous one was the FRB 121102, which has been detected a few hundred times since it was detected in 2014. It came from a small dwarf galaxy about 3 billion light-years from Earth.

Dr. Shivani Bhandari, an astronomer with CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, detected four new radio bursts using a detector on the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope in outback Western Australia. According to Forbes, these radio blasts are FRB 180924, FRB 181112, FRB 190102, and FRB 190608.

The four new FRBs come from 3-4 billion light-years away and all came from massive galaxies that are forming new stars at a modest rate, like the Milky Way galaxy.