Scientists have discovered more details about the most famous recurrence fast radio bars, a mysterious phenomenon that astronomers can not yet explain.
Astronomers first spotted this rapid radio eruption, known as FRB20180916B, in 2018, just over a decade after FRBs were first discovered. Although some FRBs are individual flashes at night, some drive rhythmically over and over; this particular FRB is of the latter category, bursting for four days and then remaining silent for 12. It is also the closest FRB scientist ever observed, at only 500 million light-years away.
The combination of regular and tight makes it a particularly attractive FRB to study, and two research teams have done so recently.
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One team uses dozens of traces made by the Low frequency array (LOFAR) in Europe and the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) to investigate the wavelength range of radio waves produced by the FRB. The researchers were able to pick up the FRB20180916B emissions using LOFAR which was three times longer (with three times a lower frequency) than previously observed.
“It tells us that the area around the source of the eruptions should be transparent for low-frequency emissions, while some theories have suggested that all low-frequency emissions would be absorbed immediately and could never be detected,” said Ziggy Pleunis. a physicist at McGill University in Canada and the lead author of one of the new studies, said in a statement.
In addition, these particularly long wavelengths of the FRB took longer to cross the large distance from the source of the FRB to the Earth’s detector. For each rhythmic eruption, LOFAR detected longer radio waves approximately three days after CHIME detected shorter radio waves.
“This systematic delay excludes explanations for the periodic activity that the frequency dependence does not allow and therefore brings us a few steps closer to understanding the origin of these mysterious eruptions,” said Daniele Michilli, a co-author on the paper and another physicist at McGill, said in the same statement.
The second new article on this FRB is based on observations collected by Europeans Very long baseline interferometry Network. The research uses a feature of light called polarization, which is encoded within four of the FRB’s eruptions to study how light changes in each pulse over time.
Previous research has found FRB pulses that range on a scale of 30 microseconds, or millionths of a second. But new research shows that some facets of the signal, at least for this particular FRB, last only a few microseconds, even if other features play out over longer time scales.
Scientists hope that all these new observations can help reduce the range of theories that the FRBs are causing. In particular, the researchers on the first paper suggest that their study suggests a scenario in which a magnetic super-dense star looks like a magnetar is interacting with a large companion star with at least ten times the mass of our sun. In that scenario, the FRB would be produced as the stream of charged particles from the companion star stream, “combing” through the magnetically controlled area around the magnetar.
Whether the theory persists will depend on future observations of FRB20180916B.
The research is described in articles published in the journals Natural Astronomy on March 22 and The astrophysical journal letters on April 9th.
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