Mysterious, Powerful Fast Radio Bursts Detected from 2 of the World’s Largest Telescopes

Astronomers recently used two of the largest radio telescopes in the world to discover the second-known example of a new fast radio burst or FRB type, specifically the mysterious, extremely powerful explosions of two radio waves pulsing through space thousands of miles every day.

The new FRB, called FRB 190520, is strong evidence that multiple celestial objects are possible sources of these mysterious signals, as specified in a Live Science report.

This new object is the second detected that not just generates repeating FRBs but also emits a constant source of weaker radiation in between bursts.

Initially spotted in 2007, fast radio bursts released more energy in a few brief milliseconds than the sun in a year. For a long time, astronomers have been puzzled over the source of such sudden bright flashes.

However, as they predominantly burst from galaxies millions or billions of light-years away and flare rapidly and frequently only once, it is very challenging to determine their sources.

Detection of Fast Radio Bursts

In 2020, an FRB's first-ever detection within the Earth's galaxy enabled astronomers to trace its origin to a magnetar, a highly-magnetized, fast-rotating husk of a dead star, which is an "ultradense stellar corpse left behind from a supernova explosion."

In their research published in the Nature journal, scientists reported that even stranger, the flashes from some FRBs repeat, at times in one brief burst, and other times, across multiple sporadic iterations.

Of these repeating FRBs, the first and most active is FRB 121102. Found in a dwarf galaxy three billion light-years away, the unknown source is pitting out radio waves from a compact region over a cycle of 157 days.

Radio Telescopes Used

The study authors caught their initial glimpses of the new fast radio burst, FRB 190520, using the five hundred meters Aperture Spherical radio Telescope or FAST of China.

FAST confirmed that the far object was ejecting frequent and repeating radio bursts, and later observations made with the Very Large Array or VLA of New Mexico pinpointed its location.

Astronomers discovered that the source of the repeating bursts, much like its cousin, was located in a dwarf galaxy, approximately three billion light-years away from Earth.

The VLA confirmed, too, that the source of FRB 190520 was "small and compact" and that it was leaking weaker radio emissions in between larger flashes.

The second arrival of FRB with behavior akin to the first raises some important questions, not to mention strengthening the probability that there could be two different FRB types, according to scientists.

Unknown Sources

Kshitij Aggarwal, the study's co-author and an astronomer and graduate student at West Virginia University, asked if those repeating are different from those that are not.

Astronomers believe that two or more different mechanisms exist to generate these stunning cosmic flashes or objects that make the explosions at different states of their cosmic evolution.

Some indirect evidence backs the second hypothesis. As FRBs frequently arrive as single pulses from unidentified origins, astronomers typically approximate how far the source is from Earth by gauging how much the emitted radio waves of an FRB are separated by frequency, such as light after passing through a prism.

Related information about the detection of fast radio bursts is shown on CW33's YouTube video below:

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