By Barry Eitel
SAN FRANCISCO (AA) – For the first time ever, astronomers working on three studies announced Wednesday that they have identified the source of bizarre radio bursts originating billions of miles away in deep space.
The source of these radio pulses, known as “fast radio bursts” (FRB), is a dwarf galaxy located some 3 billion light-years away.
Scientists still do not know what exactly cause the bursts, but they hope knowing the location will lead to an explanation.
Discovered in 2007, these phenomena have captured the imaginations of both serious researchers and the science fiction-loving public.
Only 18 have been recorded over the past 10 years and each only last for a few milliseconds, making it extremely difficult to record them and even tougher to figure out their source.
Specifically, the researchers located the source of one FRB detected in 2012 by an observatory in Puerto Rico. That observatory detected the burst again in 2014, making it the only known repeating FRB.
The international team behind the three papers, one published in the journal Nature and two published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, conducted the research at institutions including Cornell University and the University of California, Berkeley.
Some have suggested that FRB are radio communications from distant alien civilizations, but the researchers behind the recent discovery did not comment on that speculation.
“We think it may be a magnetar – a newborn neutron star with a huge magnetic field, inside a supernova remnant or a pulsar wind nebula – somehow producing these prodigious pulses,” Shami Chatterjee, a research associate at Cornell and a lead author on one of the papers, said in a statement.
“Or, it may be an active galactic nucleus of a dwarf galaxy. That would be novel. Or, it may be a combination of those two ideas – explaining why what we're seeing may be somewhat rare.”