a recent research A paper published in Nature Astronomy examines the discovery of what astronomers call “ultrafast radio bursts” – a new type of fast radio burst (FRB), which the research team says lasts for an unknown amount of time. The research team determined that it is less than 1/10 millionth of a second.Traditionally, FRBs have known that he lasts only one-thousandth of a second, but this study shows that 2021 survey The hypothesis is that the Fed could last perhaps one millionth of a second.This also follows astronomers. recently announced Discovery of the oldest and most distant FRB ever observed, approximately 8 billion light years from Earth.
“We talked about it a lot during the group meeting.” Mark Snelders said, holds a Ph.D.candidate for Astron researcher at the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) and lead author of the latest study and co-author of the 2021 study. “Coincidentally, I found out there was a public dataset that could be used for this.”
For this study, the team was able to acquire five hours of data known as known FRBs. FRB 20121102AIt was discovered in November 2012 and is located approximately 3 billion light-years from Earth, according to , and is believed to be the first known repeating FRB. 2022 survey. Data was obtained from. breakthrough listening The project is a global scientific collaboration aimed at finding evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, with data coming specifically from the Breakthrough Listen portion at Green Bank. open data archive.
Once the data was acquired, the team spent the first 30 minutes segmenting each second into 500,000 individual images and incorporating machine learning and software filters to isolate outliers in the data in just 10 millionths of a second. We identified eight sustained ultrafast radio bursts. below. For context, 1/10 millionth of a second is equivalent to 0.0000001 seconds.
“Detecting and characterizing these microsecond-lasting bursts reveals the existence of a population of ultrafast radio bursts that current wide-field FRB searches are missing due to insufficient temporal resolution,” the researchers wrote. “It showed that.” These results indicate that FRBs occur more frequently and with greater diversity than originally thought. This can also impact our understanding of energy, latency, and burst rate distributions. ”
Questions remain about how these ultrafast radio bursts are generated, but the researchers hope to identify many more in the future. However, some files lack the necessary specifications to allow splitting, making it difficult to find data files that can be split into 500,000 individual images per second.
The long-term goal of this tea is to use FRB data to map the space that exists between stars and galaxies, which will provide better insight into how galaxies interact with the gas in their surrounding environment. It is expected that
FRBs are one of the most mysterious celestial phenomena that have been studied since their inception. first discovered Discovered in 2007, astronomers have made amazing progress in understanding both their potential origins and the number of FRBs that exist in the universe. This includes discovering that most FRBs come from outside the Milky Way.
However, in 2020 astronomers discovered that one source of FRBs is from magnetars within our Milky Way galaxy. Additionally, while FRB 20121102A is designated as the first known iteration of FRB, a 2023 study identified 25 regular FRBs discovered using the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) in British Columbia, Canada. Recurring FRBs have been identified and more than 1000 FRBs have been discovered. up to now.
What new discoveries will astronomers make about FRB’s ultrafast radio bursts in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell. This is why we do science.
As always, keep doing the science and keep looking up.