Slashdot Mirror
Astronomers Record Mystery Radio Signals From 5.5 Billion Light Years Away
sarahnaomi writes For the first time ever, astronomers have captured an enormous radio wave burst in real time, bringing us one step closer to understanding their origins. These fleeting eruptions, called blitzars or FRBs (Fast Radio Bursts), are truly bizarre cosmic phenomena. In the span of a millisecond, they emit as much radiation as the Sun does over a million years. But unlike other super-luminous events that span multiple wavelengths—gamma ray bursts or supernovae, for example—blitzars emit all that energy in a tiny band of the radio light spectrum. Adding to the mystery is the rarity of blitzar sightings. Since these bursts were first discovered in 2007 with Australia's Parkes Telescope, ten have been identified, the latest of which was the first to be imaged in real time.
Now now, we all know vacuum stabilization events travel out from their sources at the speed of light, if it were to happen it would be against the laws of physics to see it coming.
More interesting is one of the actual proposed explanations. A massive spinning magnetron gradually slowing down until centrifugal force can't keep it from collapsing into a black hole anymore. And when the source of the magnetic field suddenly gets cut off from the outside universe by being engulfed by the event horizon, the magnetic field has no where to go but... out. The most powerful magnetic field in the universe getting converted almost instantly to energy; creating a spark that lasts seconds and outputs more energy than the sun has in the past million years.
Never? Really? Wow. There should be a special Achievement just for that.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Reasonable nitpick, but yes: "signal" in the signal processing context means a detected quantity whose variations may tell you something. Vibrations in the earth, detected by a seismograph, are signals.
As it (or at least the interesting bit) lasted "the span of a millisecond", those other radio-telescope operators must have acted pretty quick.
It is likely that other processes will be longer-lived. For example, if there are optical emissions associated with the event they likely involve hot matter, which will in most reasonable scenarios take much longer then milliseconds to cool down. Gamma rays from nuclear processes will likewise have lifetimes that can be into the seconds (from intermediate beta decays.)
There is a lot of mystery here. Collapsing neutron stars is on possibility, but getting the details right is going to be interesting. The billion light-year distance seems to come from dispersion measurements, which require that the initial pulse be much narrower than the observed pulse. Interstellar (and intergalactic) plasma slows down different radio wavelengths by slightly different amounts, so it will tend to spread out. By looking at the spread as a function of frequency it is possible to get an estimate of distance, but it depends on a lot of assumptions being correct.
There is still a chance, albeit small, that these are closer than currently believed.
Finally, it is worth noting that the first few detections of these things were all from the same radio telescope, and the scientific community did what we always do when something weird is seen only in one place: put on a side-bet that it was equipment malfunction, because the odds are always good on that.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.