What is It? | Hubble Detects Strange Signals In Space

 blink and you'll miss it the milky way has been throwing bright bursts of radio waves at us like a camera phone with an obnoxious flash if we could see fast radio bursts

 with the naked eye they would look

 like tiny fireworks in outer space

 since their discovery in 2007 we had no idea who was throwing such a spectacular galactic party but that is about to change welcome to

 phenomenal and today let's figure out the mystery of the supremely powerful but highly ephemeral burst of radio waves in deep space to catch sight of a fast radio burst is to be extremely lucky in where and when you point your radio dish these brief and mysterious beacons have been spotted in various and distant parts of the universe as well as in our own galaxy their origins are unknown and their appearance is unpredictable in 2007 scientists discovered a massive outburst of radio waves and energy in space but could not discern what may have caused such an explosion since then many scientists have been working restlessly on finding the source of such an exotic phenomenon in the deep space like two noir detectives working on a murder mystery in the last 15 years the case has become more convoluted as astronomers have spotted roughly a thousand more transient blasts of the same kind most of them have been nothing but coal trails as they come and go so quickly researchers have only been able to trace about 15 of them to their home galaxies all are massive and far from earth they have been still trying to pin the likely galactic neighborhoods where these beams may have originated tracking them is vitally important as the locations could offer clues to what or who is causing such enigmatic cosmic fireworks until now astronomers had a wide array of suspects behind these fast radio bursts the theories about frb's origins have seen both extremes of the spectrum of reasoning some believe that they were caused by colliding black holes while others have blamed extraterrestrial spaceships more reasonable theories suggest the bursts originate from neutron stars which are corpses of stars that died and catastrophic explosions known as supernovas as radio waves travel across space any

 interstellar gas or plasma along the

 way can distort or disperse the wave's

 properties and trajectory the degree to

 which a radio wave is dispersed can give clues to how much gas it passed through

 and possibly how much distance it has traveled from its source this helps astronomers to map the universe accurately and to understand the compositions of galaxies far beyond our reach with large numbers of frbs astronomers can hopefully figure out how gas and matter are distributed on a very large scale in the universe so alongside the mystery of what frbs are themselves there's also the exciting potential for frbs as powerful cosmological probes in the future despite so many suspects like in any good mystery novel astronomers found an unexpected twist of a revelation on april 28 2020 to get us closer to the answers prior to this date all fast radio bursts that humans were able to capture were extra galactic that is they happen in galaxies far from our own but the frb on april 28th that was different this one originated within our galaxy the milky way this was our first up and

 close confrontation with a fast radio burst chime or the canadian hydrogen intensity mapping experiment detected 535 new fast radio bursts during its first year of operation 2018 to 2019 however all of them occurred beyond our galaxy's boundary interestingly at the time of the april 28 signal the telescope was not pointing straight at the source but the signal was so strong the telescope captured it so to speak out of the corner of its eye the signal was of sufficient strength to be detected from another galaxy that indicates it is the same phenomenon as those earlier extra galactic bursts detected from our galaxy and it had the typical duration of a fast radio burst in the fraction of a second that this fast radio burst flashed it was 3 000 times brighter than any other magnetar radio signal observed to date interestingly on april 27th the day before the swift burst alert telescope had detected a series of gamma-ray bursts originating from the same point in the sky as the frb these gamma rays had originated from sgr 1935 to 154 a so-called soft gamma repeater now if you do not know what a soft gamma repeater is it is an astronomical object most likely a magnetar or a neutron star with fossil disks around them that emits a large burst of gamma rays and x-rays quite often sgr 1935-2154 in particular is known for periodically generating bursts of gamma rays and x-rays the distance to this object has been estimated at 30 000 light years for comparison the milky way galaxy is over 150 000 light years across this was also the first time an frb was found originating from an object emitting gamma-ray and x-ray bursts this had astronomers come to an astonishing conclusion the frbs may have originated from magnetars imagine a cosmic object so magnetically strong that it will even stretch the atoms in a shape resembling pencils sgr 1935 2154 is believed to be a magnetar a type of neutron star with a hyper magnetic field strong enough to pull the keys from your pocket from as far away as the moon a magnetar is an exotic type of neutron star its defining feature is that it has an ultra powerful magnetic field the field is about 1 000 times stronger than a normal neutron star and about a trillion times stronger than the earth's astrophysicists do not yet know exactly how magnetar generates its stupendous magnetic field however it probably relates to the incredible density of neutron stars and their peculiar interiors just one sugar cube size amount of neutron star material would weigh a billion tons on the earth about the same as an average mountain the neutron star's interior is a complicated dance of physics under extreme conditions resulting in very odd structures the oddity starts near the surface with blobs of a few hundred neutrons that are best described as neutron gnocchi below that the neutron blobs glued together into long chains we have entered the spaghetti layer underneath that and even more extreme pressures the spaghetti strands fuse side by side and form lasagna sheets under it all even neutron lasagna loses its shape becoming a uniform mass but that mass has gaps in it in the form of long tubes finally delicious penne am i the only one feeling a strong craving for some spicy italian food right now this exotic recipe of neutrons quarks and exotic states of matter such as bose-einstein condensates create a superconducting fluid so when a magnetar rotates like every other heavy cosmic object it would behave like a huge dynamo

 generating an immense magnetic field

 apart from these ultra powerful magnetic fields magnetars also release vast amounts of energy in the form of flares x-rays and gamma-ray bursts they are therefore associated with extreme events in the universe now including the phenomenon of fast radial bursts

 making them perhaps the most bizarre

 objects in the cosmos next to black holes after the revelation made on april 28 2020 astronomers have theorized that frbs might be produced when the crust of the neutron star suffers a starquake as a result of tension between a neutron star's intense gravity and its magnetic field this tension may be suddenly and incomprehensibly violently released in the starquake this may mean that the neutron star's crust thought to be a million times stronger than steel slips by just a millimeter however this tiny shift may be sufficient to generate a brief burst of radio energy so powerful it can be detected from other galaxies which we detect as an frb just maybe it seems possible and in astrophysics what's possible is the name of the game but does that mean we can close the case of these mysterious flashes across the universe and proclaim magnetars as the sole reason for their occurrence chime or the canadian hydrogen intensity mapping experiment is a telescope with no moving parts located near penticton and british columbia at any given time it observes one narrow strip of the sky above it but as the earth rotates the telescope scans the sky and digital processing chips collected signals to form an image the results gathered by this telescope seem to cement the idea that there are at least two distinct types of fast radial bursts out of 535 frbs detected by chime 61 are repeaters which means that they have been seen emitting bursts multiple times the rest of the detected frps were concluded to be a one-off event and rather on the short side in duration repeaters also emit on a much narrower band of radio frequencies than the one-off bursts fast radio bursts tend to be detected over one second or more but this duration is misleadingly long as signals travel across millions of light years of space intergalactic matter tends to smear radio waves across the spectrum a phenomenon known as dispersion as a result lower frequency waves can arrive at earth with a delay of several seconds compared with higher frequency ones researchers have calculated that at the source the emission of a radial burst typically lasts only a few milliseconds during that time the source of a burst can emit 500 million times more energy than the sun over a comparable amount of time this extent of the dispersion of wavelengths provides a rough indication of how far the waves had to travel so far all the births have been shown to originate in other galaxies except for one event that occurred in the milky way the repeater discovered by spitler and her collaborators in 2016 has cycles of activity lasting a day or so emitting several bursts per hour and repeating every 160 days this regular repetition offers some clues to what might be causing the bursts one possible explanation spitler says is that repeaters could occur when a highly magnetized neutron star circles around an ordinary star in an elongated orbit as a neutron star

 periodically gets closer to its companion burst could result from its magnetic field scattering the highly energetic stellar wind non-repeaters on the other hand could

 be the result of cataclysmic events

 such as the collisions of neutron stars or magnetic storms in young neutron stars called magnetars the milky way event was linked to a known magnetar but the magnetar theory has been cast into doubt by the finding reported last month of a burst from a globular cluster in the galaxy m813 globular clusters are dense collections of very old stars and are considered unlikely to host magnus stars this begs the question are

 we back to square one with this mystery

 if magnetars are not the cause then can we look into other possibilities the good thing is that recent discoveries have helped us to discard many sources which still bring us closer to the answer as sherlock holmes said once you eliminate the impossible whatever remains no matter how improbable must be the truth so it's rather elementary my dear viewer that we will soon unveil the secrets of fast radio burst and open the endless possibilities of traversing through space so what are your thoughts tell us in the comments and as always thanks for reading fact nominal