Emily Chan
From beyond the Milky Way, short, quick blasts of radio waves are occurring, and scientists aren’t sure why. These blasts are called fast radio bursts (FRBs). They can produce the same amount of energy in just thousandths of a second that the sun takes three days to do.
Every day, it is thought that around 10,000 FRBs erupt in the sky. However, despite their frequency and intensity, their cause has remained a mystery.
Most FRBs flash once and disappear immediately. Under three percent of FRBs repeat the flash. It is unclear why that is. The very first FRB was discovered in 2007 by astronomers named Duncan Lorimer and David Narkevic. The burst was non-repeating. Five years later, the first repeating FRB was found.
To learn more about FRBs, scientists from the University of Toronto studied the properties of polarized light linked to 128 non-repeating FRBs. Their analysis revealed that these FRBs come from faraway galaxies that are similar to our Milky Way, unlike their repeating counterparts.
Polarized light is made up of light waves that are oriented in the same direction. By examining the changes in polarization, the scientists may be able to explain what launched the FRBs.
They can also uncover details about what environmental conditions FRBs need to pass through in order to show up on Earth’s detectors.
Repeating FRBs are easier to observe than non-repeating ones because researchers already know where they will appear.
But, for non-repeating FRBs, the researchers must look at a much larger area of the sky because they don’t know where the signal will come from. Naturally, astronomers have wondered about whether there are differences between these two types of FRBs.
The research team discovered that the polarization of non-repeating FRBs is less than repeating FRBs, meaning that the former likely passes through less material or weaker magnetic fields.
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