Australian Astronomers have managed to pick up yet another set of fast radio bursts thanks to the Microvariability and Oscillations of Stars telescope, better known simply as MOST. Deputy director of the Center for Astrophysics and Supercomputing of Swinburne University of Technology, Matthew Bailes wrote on Facebook about the new fast radio burst which remains a mystery.
From 2007 until today, 17 of these anomalous radio signals have been discovered by astronomers who remain perplexed by the origin of the signals. Each one of the FRBs (Fast radio bursts) comes from space lasting a few milliseconds at most, but emitting as much energy as our sun does in 10,000 years.
While ‘Alien civilizations’ are among the favorite explications of the mysterious radio signals among many, scientists have no idea what causes these mysterious bursts. In order to establish their exact origin, scientists had to estimate the distance to the ‘object’ where the FRBs originated from, which was achieved not long ago. While researchers still have no idea what causes the mysterious phenomenon, they hope that future studies will allow them to understand the nature behind the FRBs.
At the moment, there are two theories. According to the first, the radio burst has an extragalactic source and comes from a blitzar, a massive neutron star whose rotation speed prevents it from becoming a black hole. The second hypothesis states that the radio burst have a galactic origin. In particular, among the possible sources are magnetars, which are neutron stars with a strong magnetic field.
However, these radio signals have become more frequent throughout the years. Not long ago, the Parkes radio Telescope in Australia detected five radio bursts that could potentially indicate intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos. According to reports from arXiv.org, an unprecedented double burst has recently shown up together with four more of the anomalous flashes. According to statements from the team of scientists, the double burst FRB (called 121002) discovered last year, had a “clear two-component profile”. Interestingly, the five signals detected follow the same pattern as its predecessors with one SMALL exception: one of them flashed twice, this little fact is extremely important since there has never, until now, been a double blast.
The twin-blast signal was separated by 2.4 milliseconds coming out of some sort of ‘eruption’ that happened, according to studies, 9 BILLION years ago in the Constellation Octans.
Last year, Michael Hippke of Germany’s Institute for Data Analysis set out to measure 11 radio bursts finding something extremely odd: The dispersion measures seem to follow a mathematical pattern. Hippke found that he dispersion measures are integer multiples of the same number, 187.5. The team calculated a 5 in 10,000 chance of the pattern being pure coincidence.
What is even more odd is the fact that NO ASTROPHYSICAL SYSTEMS that we know of can produce a similar stepwise distribution of dispersion measures.