Radio signals from the cosmos Scientists are tested on Earth because of their unusual behavior. It’s about the “fast radio bursts” (FRB, in English), of which so far it has only been possible to determine where they originate.
With the most recent detection of a FRB that reached the land in a 16-day constant cycle, The mystery has increased. Several others have been observed, but only 10 of them have been repeated. Some experts believe that it could be somehow alien communication, while most use the world’s most advanced radio telescopes to determine what produces them.
Since its detection in 2007, astronomers knew almost nothing about FRB. It was only last year that an international team published in the prestigious journal Science found for the first time the precise origin of a FRB, in English.
These cosmic waves can emit in one thousandth of a second the equivalent of 10,000 years of solar energy, the researchers explain.
The causes of these monstrous impulses of energy are ignored, but astronomers agree on one point: they come from galaxies far, far away.
Since they were discovered, just over 85 have been detected FRB. Most of them were unique: just a flash and then nothing. But some repeated.
It was in 2017 that a team of astronomers was able to accurately locate, for the first time, the source of a repeated burst, which they called FRB 121102.
The source of FRB 121102 was located 3,000 million light years away, which reveals the amount of energy these pulses have to travel through space.
Scientists use instruments such as the ASKAP radio telescope and telescopes located in Chile and Hawaii to detect them.
“[Este trabajo] It is equivalent to observing the Earth from the Moon and to locate not only in which house such a person lives but where he sits to eat, ”said Keith Bannister of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO).
While the FRB located in 2017, it came from a dwarf galaxy, the one described in mid-2019 comes from the surroundings of a massive galaxy composed of old stars. The most recent comes from a spiral galaxy about 500 million light years away.
This led the researchers to conclude that … they still don’t know how these bursts form.
“This would imply that the FRB repeated and non-repeated have totally different origins, “said Shriharsh Tendulkar, an astronomer at McGill University outside the team of scientists.
The discovery fascinates the astronomer community because it provides new information about what is found in the spaces located between the galaxies. And it could help them solve the origin of the “missing matter” in the universe.
The VLA multi-antenna radio telescope in New Mexico allowed locating the location of the FRB signal for the first time.
Scientists drive a theory to explain Why the number of atoms observed in stars is 50% lower than the theoretical calculations: the missing atoms would be found in ionized gases in intergalactic spaces.
Cosmic waves disperse during their trip to Earth, in a manner similar to that which light is refracted when passing through a prism.
The team’s observations correspond to what the theory predicted about the amount of matter that is in the path of those waves.
But thousands and even tens of thousands of additional observations must be made to to be able to map the confines of the universe.
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