Scientists have discovered more details about probably the most famous repetition rapid radio explosion, a mysterious phenomenon astronomers still can not explain.
Astronomers first observed this rapid radio explosion, known as FRB20180916B, in 2018, just over a decade after FRBs were first discovered. Although some FRBs are individual flashes at night, some rhythmic cycle again and again; this particular FRB is in the last category, erupting for four days and then remaining quiet for 12. It is also the closest FRB scientists they have observed so far, at “only” 500 million. light years away.
The combination of frequency and proximity makes FRB a particularly attractive study, and two teams of researchers have recently done so.
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One team used dozens of detections made by Low Frequency Matrix (LOFAR) in Europe and the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) to examine the range of radio wavelengths produced by the FRB. The researchers were able to take over the emissions from FRB20180916B using LOFAR, which were three times longer (with a frequency three times lower) than the previously observed emissions from the same FRB.
“This tells us that the region around the source of the outbursts must be transparent to low-frequency emissions, while some theories suggest that all low-frequency emissions would be absorbed immediately and could never be detected,” Ziggy said. Pleunis, a physicist at McGill University in Canada and the lead author of one of the new studies, he said in a statement.
In addition, these particularly long FRB wavelengths took longer to traverse the long distance from the FRB source to the Earth’s detectors. For each rhythmic outburst, LOFAR detected longer radio waves about three days after CHIME detected shorter radio waves.
“This systematic delay precludes explanations for periodic activity that do not allow for frequency dependence and thus brings us a few steps closer to understanding the origin of these mysterious explosions,” Daniele Michilli, co-author on paper and another physicist at McGill, said in the same statement.
The second new paper on this FRB is based on the observations gathered by Europeans Very long basic interferometry Network. The research uses a feature of light called polarization encoded in four of the FRB outbursts to study how the light in each pulse changes over time.
Previous research has found variable FRB pulses at a scale of 30 microseconds or millionths of a second. But new research shows that at least for this particular FRB, some facets of the signal last only a few microseconds, even if other features run on longer time scales.
Scientists hope that all these new observations could help narrow the range of theories underlying the causes of FRB. In particular, the researchers in the first paper propose that their study indicates a scenario in which a superdensently magnetic stellar corpse called magnetic interacts with a large accompanying star with at least 10 times the mass of our sun. In this scenario, the FRB would have produced as the flow of charged particles flowing from the accompanying star “comb” through the magnetically governed area around the magnet.
Whether this theory is maintained will depend on future observations of FRB20180916B.
The research is described in papers published in journals Nature Astronomy on March 22 and The Astrophysical Journal Letters on April 9.
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