Astronomers have observed a strange cosmic object fire 1,652 energy blasts in a short span of time. Despite the fact that scientists are still baffled as to what caused the eruptions, they are hopeful that the observations will help them come closer to an answer.
A fast radio burst (FRB) is the mysterious event in question, which was first noticed in 2007. FRBs emit radio pulses that last only a few thousandths of a second but produce as much energy as the sun produces in a year.
Some FRBs emit energy just once, while others, such FRB 121102 in a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years away, are known to repeat their bursts. A team of scientists chose to perform a detailed examination of this repeating FRB using China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST).
"Initially, it was just stamp collecting," Bing Zhang, an astrophysicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told Live Science.
The researchers watched FRB 121102 explode 1,652 times over the course of 60 hours, with the fastest frequency being nearly one explosion every 30 seconds.
FRBs are difficult to investigate, owing to the fact that they are almost invariably found beyond our galaxy, and often at a great distance even in universal terms. A FRB was discovered in our own galaxy in 2020, and scientists were able to identify it as a magnetar, a type of stellar corpse known as a neutron star.
It is too early to establish whether all FRBs are magnetars or if magnetars are only one probable source of FRBs. We also don't know how magnetars generate FRBs, so it's difficult to know what to look for in FRB 121102.
Zhang was able to rule out gases and dust surrounding the source as a reason since the rapid series of explosions did not allow for such types of material to accumulate in sufficient quantity to feed the next explosion.
The mystery is intriguing, and with new instruments like FAST coming online that are even better at identifying new signals in radio and other previously inaccessible wavelengths of light, there should be plenty more mysteries for us to discover and possibly solve.
