Bizarre ‘fast radio bursts’ detected from space
Repeated pulses originate from 3 billion light-years away
They came from outer space. More “fast radio bursts” — very short-lived pulses of radio waves that come from across the universe — have been detected by astronomers using two of the world’s largest telescopes.
The bursts, which come from a galaxy more than 3 billion light-years from Earth, repeated 16 times. These are the only known fast radio bursts that have repeated.
Fast radio bursts, which are highly energetic but last just a few thousandths of a second, have puzzled astrophysicists since their discovery a little more than a decade ago. Since 2007, several of these bursts have been recorded by telescopes around the world.
What’s new about this discovery is that astronomers are starting to hone in on the specific source of the strange calls from across the universe.
The new findings suggest the bursts come from an environment with an extremely high magnetic field and temperature, and such conditions have been observed only in the vicinity of massive black holes.
The findings were presented Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting and published in the peer-reviewed British journal Nature.
The study authors said the source of the radio bursts is in an astonishingly extreme and unusual environment: likely a highly magnetized rotating neutron star — known as a magnetar — near a black hole that’s growing as gas and dust fall into it.
Another possibility, though remote, is that the fast radio bursts are a highpowered signal from an advanced civilization. “We cannot rule out completely the extraterrestrial hypothesis for the fast radio bursts,” said study co-author Vishal Gajjar at the University of California-Berkeley.