FRB tagged posts

An international team of astronomers, including researchers from the Department of Physics at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), has uncovered the first decisive evidence that at least some fast radio burst (FRB) sources—brief but powerful flashes of radio waves from distant galaxies—reside in binary stellar systems. This means the FRB source is not an isolated star, as previously assumed, but part of a binary stellar system in which two stars orbit each other.

Using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) located in Guizhou, also known as the “China Sky Eye,” the team detected a distinctive signal that reveals the presence of a nearby companion star orbiting the FRB source.

The discovery, publ...

Fast radio bursts from distant neutron stars resemble earthquakes rather than solar flares. Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are an astronomical mystery, with their exact cause and origins still unconfirmed. These intense bursts of radio energy are invisible to the human eye, but show up brightly on radio telescopes. Previous studies have noted broad similarities between the energy distribution of repeat FRBs, and that of earthquakes and solar flares...

We have just published evidence in Nature Astronomy for what might be producing mysterious bursts of radio waves coming from distant galaxies, known as fast radio bursts or FRBs.

Two colliding neutron stars—each the super-dense core of an exploded star—produced a burst of gravitational waves when they merged into a “supramassive” neutron star. We found that two and a half hours later they produced an FRB when the neutron star collapsed into a black hole.

Or so we think. The key piece of evidence that would confirm or refute our theory—an optical or gamma-ray flash coming from the direction of the fast radio burst—vanished almost four years ago. In a few months, we might get another chance to find out if we are correct.

Brief and powerful
FRBs are in...

IMAGE: The 305-metre Arecibo telescope, in Puerto Rico, and its suspended support platform of radio receivers is shown amid a starry night. A flash from the Fast Radio Burst source FRB 121102 is seen: originating beyond the Milky Way, from deep in extragalactic space. CREDITS: Image design: Danielle Futselaar – Photo usage: Brian P. Irwin / Dennis van de Water / Shutterstock.com

Extragalactic source of radio-wave flashes resides in a powerfully magnetized astrophysical region. New detections of radio waves from a repeating fast radio burst have revealed an astonishingly potent magnetic field in the source’s environment, indicating that it is situated near a massive black hole or within a nebula of unprecedented power.

A year ago, the astronomers pinpointed the location of the enigmatic fas...