A scientific team has just reported discovering twisted fields around a fast radio burst, a breakthrough that could finally reveal the source of the mysterious signals.
Fast radio bursts have been a hot topic in astronomy since their discovery 15 years ago. Now, an international team of scientists, made up of researchers from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) and West Virginia University, using the Parkes Telescope in Australia and the Green Bank Telescope in the US, has believes to have established the origin, by studying FRB 20190520B, an FRB that resides in a dwarf galaxy about four billion light-years from Earth.
The fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are radio emissions that appear momentarily and randomlymaking them not only hard to find, but also hard to study.
The mystery lies in the fact that it is not known what could have caused such a short and sharp eruption.
Contained in the radio band of the electromagnetic spectrum, these strangely bright flashes of light appear momentarily and randomly from space.
This has led some to speculate that they could be anything from colliding stars to artificially created messages.
It’s not clear exactly what the source is, raising the possibility that extraterrestrial life is responsible, but it appears to come from a “compact object” lying next to a massive star with strong stellar winds.
The scientists involved in the new study said the object could be a black hole or a highly magnetized neutron star known as a magnetaralthough none of the theories quite fit “considering all the data”.
They came to their conclusion after discovering that the FRB drastically changed their signal twice while they were analyzing it.
The only explanation for this, the experts say, is that the surrounding magnetic fields must have been reversed or twisted by a “turbulent” force.
They believe that to have produced something ‘as messy as a tangle of wool’, the signal must have passed through the “dense and variable stellar wind of a companion star” relatively close to the source.
Some FRBs appear to be isolated events, so it was thought that a catastrophic explosion such as an extreme supernova might be a possible explanation for this.
The new study has been published in the journal Science.
Source: Eluniverso
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