Scientists come up with more credible theories on mysterious fast radio burst

In 2007, astronomers had discovered some mysterious signals, named fast radio burst (FRB), a phenomenon that they cannot yet explain. According to EarthSky, these bursts are short but strong. Although lasting .001 of a second long, the energy it radiates in that millisecond is stronger than what Sun puts out in three days. In April 2020, the fast radio burst repeated three times, once in January, following with July and then November. Currently, two scientist teams have been tasked with the mission to study the source of the FRB. Here is what has been discovered till now.

Scientists pen down a detailed study of the closest known Fast Radio Burst

The strange aspect about these FRBs is that most of them cycle rhythmically over and over again, as though waking up from a deep slumber in space right on schedule to give us a glimpse of its capabilities. The two teams that were appointed for the FRB study made use of dozens of detections from the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) and the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) to examine the wavelength range of the radio waves produced by its source. Ziggy Pleunis, a physicist at McGill University in Canada said in a statement that the new research directs that the region around the source of the bursts must be transparent to low-frequency emission.

This varies from some theories that suggest that all low-frequency emission would be absorbed right away and could never be detected. Additionally, they also found out that the longer wavelengths took more time to brush by the Earth's detectors than the shorter waves, about three days extra to be exact. This delay rules out all the explanations previously confined to the periodic activity and thus brings the scientists closer to understanding the origin of the FRB.

With this new lead, scientists are hoping to uncover more secrets of this mysterious phenomenon. In particular, their eyes are on the theory determined in the first paper that proposed that the source of the FRB would come from the interaction between the magnetic superdense stellar corpse called a magnetar and a large companion star in the space with at least 10 times the mass of our sun. More observations of FRB20180916B will determine the actual reality.

Image Source: ASTRON