Mystery Surrounds Repeating Short Bursts Of Cosmic Radio Waves

Astronomers have been searching the skies for a long time seeking out radio signals that they believe intelligent life would be producing. So far, none has been discovered that have proven to be from intelligent life. A new source of very short bursts of radio waves has been discovered from a source that is well beyond the edge of the Milky Way galaxy.

Scientists believe these fast radio bursts are coming from some sort of extremely powerful object that frequently produces multiple bursts of signals in under a minute. This sort of fast radio burst (FRB) has been detected before, but they have all be one of a kind events. The reason for the radio bursts being onetime events was thought to be because the production of the FRBs was tied to the destruction of their source, such as a star gong supernova or a neutron star collapsing into a black hole.

The first FRBs were reported about a decade ago and while researchers searched for the FRBs again, they have never found a repeated transmission. On November 5 2015, that changed when a PhD from McGill University was looking at observation results from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. The data had been gathered in May and June. The data found several radio bursts consistent with a FRB that had been first detected in 2012.

The telescope had recorded ten new bursts suggesting that the bursts come from a very exotic object like a rotating neutron star with unprecedented power. The researchers also believe that this could be the discovery of a new sub-class of cosmic FRB. The radio waves are distinguishable from radio waves made on Earth due to plasma dispersion. The ten new ERBs have three times the maximum dispersion that would be found from a source within the Milky Way. The team hopes to identify the galaxy the FRBs originate from in future research.

SOURCE: Phys.org