The Conversation contributed the article to Space.com's expert voices.
A researcher in astronomy and astrophysics at West Virginia University.
A new fast radio burst has some unique properties that are giving astronomy important clues into what may cause these mysterious astronomical phenomena while also calling into question one of the few things scientists thought they knew about these powerful flares, as my colleagues and I describe in a new study.
A fast radio burst is a bright pulse of radio waves. The sun releases as much energy in a day as they do in a minute. The first FRB was detected back in 2007. Over the past 15 years, astronomy has detected around 800 FRBs, with more being discovered daily.
The 'Weird signal' comes from the stars. Why is it happening?
One of the most important features of a telescope is dispersion. A measure of how stretched out an FRB is is dispersion.
All light, including radio waves, is slowed down by the plasma that lies between stars and galaxies. The dispersion is caused by the higher frequencies hitting Earth before the lower frequencies. dispersion can be used to estimate how far from Earth an FRB came from. The closer the source is to the signal, the more it must have passed through.
The new FRB is called FRB190520, and it was discovered by me and my colleagues. It was found using a telescope in China. One of the most interesting things about FRB190520 is that it is one of the only 24 repeating FRBs and repeats more often than others.
The Very Large Array, a radio telescope in New Mexico, was used by our team to find the source of the FRB. We began to realize how important this FRB is.
There is a persistent, though much fainter, radio signal coming from the same place. Only one other FRB has the same persistent radio signal as the others.
We were able to figure out how far away the dwarf galaxy is from Earth because we were able to identify it. This result didn't seem right. The estimate we made using the dispersion of the FRB was 30 billion light years from Earth, which was ten times larger than the actual 3 billion light years to the galaxy.
Astronomers have only been able to locate the exact location of 19 otherFRB sources. Astronomers have to rely on dispersion to estimate their distance from Earth. The estimated distances from dispersion are very close to the actual distances to their source galaxies. Estimates using dispersion can sometimes be incorrect and thrown out the window.
Every new discovery or piece of information is important becauseAstronomers in this new field don't know what exactly produces FRBs.
The new discovery raises questions about whether persistent radio signals are common, what conditions produce them, and whether the same phenomenon that produces FRBs is responsible for emitting the persistent radio signal.
There is a huge mystery as to why the dispersion of FRB190520 was so great. Was it due to something in the area? Is it related to the radio source? Does it have to do with the matter in the universe? There are no answers to these questions.
My colleagues are going to use a number of different telescopes around the world to look at the same object. We want to find answers to many of the mysteries that were revealed by the FRB.
There will be more answers in the future. The more astronomer's catalog there is, the better the chance of finding interesting properties that can help complete the puzzle of these fascinating phenomena.
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