Mark Megahan
Astronomers say the signal coming from FRB 121102 is more of a mind-bending phenomena than a pan galactic gargle blaster. When the first “fast radio burst” startled scientists in 2007, they puzzled over the source. What made them even more frantic was the fact some “of them even repeat, and demonstrate unexplained patterns of activity.”
Fast burst phenomena
In 2012 they got their first clue to the origins of the strange phenomena, when they found FRB 121102. It provided “some amazing insights.” An international team of scientists was soon hard at work recording “an incredible 1,652 independent radio bursts from the mysterious source in just 47 days.”
Respected and peer-reviewed journal Nature reported earlier this month, on October 13, that their findings represent “the highest activity ever recorded from an FRB.” At one point, in the span of one hour they caught “122 radio bursts coming in.”
The huge jump in numbers is what’s making astronomers and physicists take notice. As Nature reveals, the “scale of the discovery is remarkable: the total number of previously reported FRBs from this source was a mere 349.”
That, they say, makes it “the largest sample of bursts from one FRB source collected so far.” Dr. Bing Zhang has been studying the phenomena at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. He’s a professor of both physics and astronomy, who’s students call him Dr. Big Bang, only not to his face.
In order to catch the speedy signals they made observations “using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in China between August 29 and October 29, 2019.”
That let them get a handle on the structure of the bursts like never before. It also made them even more confused about the strange phenomena than ever before. “What they discovered complicates the search for a source even as it narrows down the field of possibilities.”
More than one mechanism
Scientists are totally baffled by this phenomena and they aren’t ashamed to admit it.
“The vast number of detections allowed the researchers to thoroughly search for any sign of periodicity, or quasi-periodicity, meaning a pattern in the repeating signals that might indicate a single spinning source such as a pulsar. They found none.” That means time to go back to basics.
Since they can’t track down “the” source of the fast burst phenomena, maybe there “might be more than one mechanism to generate FRBs from one source, even though observations of more repeating sources are needed to confirm this.”
At least, that’s what Zhang thinks. “Since FRB 121102 is a representative of active repeaters, these implications apply to all repeaters in general.”
One thing the new work has done is eliminate a possibility and narrow the field of options to consider. Zhang is convinced that the new research essentially rules out the leading contender to explain the mystery phenomena. “The leading model to interpret FRBs invokes magnetars, the most magnetized neutron stars in the universe.” It makes sense but has problems.
“There are two versions of it, one involving the magnetosphere of the magnetar to emit FRBs, another invoking shocks far from the magnetosphere to generate them. This observation disfavors the latter mechanism which has a very low efficiency to generate bursts. Because there are so many bursts produced in a short time, some of them are only separated by milliseconds, it is essentially impossible for the latter model to work.” Sorry guys. Keep hammering.
3 Comments