Strange repeating fast radio burst raises new questions for astronomers

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Astronomers examined the source of the second recorded, repeating fast radio burst, FRB 190520; The super-strong flares are accompanied by much weaker but stable radio emission in between. The new discovery raises questions about the nature of these mysterious phenomena, which have not yet been fully explained, as well as the possibility of using “radio transmission” from it to study intergalactic spaces. An article about this was published in the journal. Nature.

Fast radio burst FRB 190520 was detected on May 20, 2019 using the China 500m Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) and was detected in instrument data in November of the same year, after which scientists used the Large Radio Array. Karl Jansky National Science Foundation (VLA) and other telescopes to study this object. Subsequent observations using the same FAST showed that it emits highly repetitive radio pulses, unlike the vast majority of other non-repeating fast radio bursts. Observations made using the VLA in 2020 made it possible to pinpoint the source, which made it possible for the Japanese Subaru telescope, operating in the optical range in Hawaii, to correlate the radio pulses with the outskirts of a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years away. from the world. The VLA observations also showed that the found object was continuously emitting much weaker radio waves in the intervals between super-strong flares.

“These features make it very similar in location – and again with the help of the VLA – to the first FRB of the same type identified in 2016,” explains Casey Low, one of the paper’s co-authors. California Institute of Technology. This case was a major breakthrough in the study of fast radio bursts, which provided the first information about the FRB’s surroundings and distance from Earth. However, the combination of repetitive bursts and continuous inter-burst radio emission from the compact region has made the 2016 object, designated FRB 121102, unique so far. Now that two such objects are known, astronomers suspect they will need to be separated into a separate class of objects.

Astronomers can usually estimate the density of the interstellar medium from the dispersion of radio waves coming from a source to Earth – passing through a medium filled with free electrons, the high-frequency waves begin to outstrip the low-frequency waves – this effect usually estimates the distances to the pulsars – however, in the case of FRB 190520, all this is useless , the scatter shows a much larger distance – 8-9.5 billion light years. This riddle will also be solved. Perhaps the medium through which the radio waves pass is much denser than usual. The paper’s authors suggested that FRB 190520 might still be a fairly “young” formation, still surrounded by a dense cloud ejected as a result of a supernova explosion, leaving behind a source—an extremely strongly magnetized neutron star—a magnetar. .

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