Fast Radio Bursts tagged posts

By studying the site of a spectacular stellar explosion seen in April 2020, a Chalmers-led team of scientists have used four European radio telescopes to confirm that astronomy’s most exciting puzzle is about to be solved. Fast radio bursts, unpredictable millisecond-long radio signals seen at huge distances across the universe, are generated by extreme stars called magnetars — and are astonishingly diverse in brightness.

For over a decade, the phenomenon known as fast radio bursts has excited and...

Signal from 500 million light years away is the first periodic pattern of radio bursts detected. A team of astronomers, including researchers at MIT, has picked up on a curious, repeating rhythm of fast radio bursts emanating from an unknown source outside our galaxy, 500 million light years away.

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are short, intense flashes of radio waves that are thought to be the product of small, distant, extremely dense objects, though exac...

The find could be a big clue about the nature of fast radio bursts. Astronomers have discovered an activity cycle in another fast radio burst, potentially unearthing a significant clue about these mysterious deep-space phenomena.

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are extragalactic flashes of light that pack a serious wallop, unleashing in a few milliseconds as much energy as Earth’s sun does in a century. Scientists first spotted an FRB in 2007, and the cause of these eruptions remains elusive nearly a decade and a half later; potential explanations range from merging superdense neutron stars to advanced alien civilizations.

IceCube is a neutrino detector composed of 5,160 optical modules embedded in a gigaton of crystal-clear ice a mile beneath the geographic South Pole. PHOTO COURTESY OF NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

For a decade, astronomers have puzzled over fast radio bursts, FRBs, which were first detected in 2007 by astronomers scouring archival data from Australia’s Parkes Telescope, a 64-meter diameter dish best known for its role receiving live televison images from the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. But the antenna’s detection of the first FRB – and the subsequent confirmed discovery of nearly two dozen more powerful radio pulses across the sky by Parkes and other radio telsescopes – has sent astrophysicists scurrying to find more of the objects and to explain them.

“It’s a new class of astronomical ...