Weird But True
Is ET phoning home?
Astronomers have made some earth-shattering revelations regarding Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), mysterious and powerful flashes of intergalactic light that have confounded scientists for years. These could potentially point them one step closer to uncovering the mechanisms of the vexing cosmic phenomena.
They detailed their groundbreaking and “strange” insights recently in a study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
“This work is exciting because it provides both confirmation of known FRB properties and the discovery of some new ones,” said Dr. Sofia Sheikh, lead author and postdoctoral fellow at the SETI (the Search For Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Institute.
For the uninitiated, FRBs are brief, intense flashes of radio waves from deep space,” which can generate, in one millisecond, as much energy as the sun does in a year, according to Space.com.
Some FRBs appear just once while others, known as repeaters, send out multiple signals — like a cosmic morse code.
First detected in 2007, hundreds of these intergalactic transmissions have since been observed emanating from distant points in the universe. So far scientists have tracked just 50 FRBs back to their origin points, while most aren’t traceable with current space exploration technologies.
To shed light on this particular celestial event, researchers used the refurbished Allen Telescope Array (ATA) to conduct a detailed observation of repeating FRB 20220912A.
After over 541 hours of observation, the interstellar wind-talkers recorded 35 FRBs, spanning a wide range within the lower part of the frequency spectrum.
That’s when they made an astonishing revelation: For the first time, scientists noticed a drop in the center frequency of the outbursts, akin to, as CNN described, a celestial slide whistle.
This dip became apparent when researchers translated the signals into sound with xylophone notes — not unlike the spaceship symphony from “Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.”
Unfortunately, unlike other FRBs, 20220912A didn’t exhibit a specific pattern to the bursts, perhaps demonstrating their unpredictability, and researchers stopped short of speculating what the frequency blip could mean.
Despite the breakthrough study, scientists are still a long way off from discovering the secret behind these interstellar radio waves.
“We’re narrowing down the source of FRBs, for example, to extreme objects such as magnetars [neutron stars with powerful magnetic fields], but no existing model can explain all of the properties that have been observed so far,” said Dr. Sheikh.
She hopes that telescopes like ATA will “help provide a new angle on outstanding mysteries in FRB science.”
In October, astronomers discovered an 8-billion-year-old FRB — identified as FRB 20220610A — that lasted only a millisecond but released the amount of energy our sun emits in three decades.
