(ORDO NEWS) — Chinese astronomers explain the origin of nearly 2,000 mysterious FRBs – fast radio bursts from deep space
Without aliens
An unprecedented number of signals – the so-called fast radio bursts (FRB) – were recorded by astronomers working on the FAST telescope (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope) installed in China.
His plate – the largest in the world – an area of 30 football fields – for 82 hours last year received 1800 “messages” in the form of short impulses – these same FRBs.
The year before, the telescope had picked up 1,650 pieces. In both cases, the “radio operators” located the sources. They were in distant galaxies – the distance to them is 1.5 and 3 billion light years.
Scientists cannot explain the nature of all FRBs. According to them, none of the objects of the Universe known today is capable of independently generating such strange signals in a natural way.
However, the source, which was one and a half billion light years from us and received the designation FRB 20201124A, prompted an idea.
Chinese scientists from the School of Astronomy and Space Science, Nanjing University, led by Professor Fayin Wang, based on specific data related to the behavior of FRB 20201124A, proposed an explanation – intricate, but quite scientific. And no aliens.
Astronomers have decided that the signals are sent by a double star.
According to the Chinese, one of the stars of the source they discovered is a magnetar, a neutron star that has a powerful magnetic field and from time to time absorbs the matter of a neighboring star.
The neighbor is a very massive and hot blue star – the so-called Be star, surrounded by a disk – like Saturn. It rotates rapidly and scatters its matter around. The disk just also consists of this gaseous matter.
The magnetar now and then flies through the disk, from which it signals with these very FRBs – as if oohing. The signals are different because the disk is inhomogeneous, and Be stars are variable, and even pulsating.
With aliens
Let me remind you. For the first time and purely by chance, astronomer Duncan Lorimer from West Virginia University in Morgantown drew attention to strange outbreaks in 2007. I stumbled upon them among archival records.
Five years later, the scientific community recognized that FRBs are not a hardware glitch, not some kind of interference, but real signals. In 2012, astronomers discovered four more, then another and another.
Signals came from all directions, from different places – very and not very distant. Then sources were discovered that sent radiation in ordered series, either turning on for several days, then turning off.
FRBs began to register first in tens, then in hundreds, and now in thousands. The starry sky turned out to be literally filled with flashes of a mysterious nature.
In addition to the Chinese, signals are caught by numerous other largest radio telescopes Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), Very Large Array, European Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network.
Some radio flashes behave, to put it mildly, strangely: they change frequency, starting a “transmission”, increase their power hundreds of times in a split second, send signals in different directions. Some are polarized, others are not.
There are sources that “get in touch” only once, and then they seem to disappear, and those that “broadcast” regularly from one place. But all of them have tremendous power. It is enough for the signal to flash through billions of light-years of interstellar space.
Surprisingly, but before the advent of the Chinese hypothesis, many quite serious astronomers, perplexed and unable to figure it out, did not rule out that FRBs are of artificial origin.
That is, they are products of the technological activity of some highly developed extraterrestrial civilizations.
Once upon a time, the term “signals from aliens” was even coined for FRB. In jest, of course. Although, who knows, suddenly he, in the end, will turn out to be true.
For example, astrophysicists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), led by Avi Loeb (Avi Loeb) suggest artificial transmitters the size of our Earth or even more as sources of “fast radio bursts”.
Scientists believe that the brothers in mind move their starships, which are equipped with appropriate receivers, with short and powerful impulses. Maybe push them from time to time. Or just supply energy.
After estimating the power of the flashes, Loeb calculated: it should be enough to move spaceships weighing a million tons – 20 times heavier than the largest terrestrial ocean liner.
If so, the recent FRB activity is alarming. Either the aliens were worried about something, and they moved somewhere en masse, or the Universe became restless from something.
A few years ago, Michael Hippke from the Institute for Data Analysis in Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany and John Learned from the University of Hawaii in Manoa got a reason to suspect aliens in the FRB mailing list.
They found that fast flashes include high and low frequency radio waves. All the signals caught by that time were subject to a single pattern – the delay time of low frequencies relative to high frequencies is a multiple of 187.5. What this means is also not yet clear – until now. But it looks intriguing.
Total
The Chinese explanation of the possible nature of “fast radio bursts” will, of course, upset fans of the anomalous – those who believe in brothers.
The arguments for the existence of developed extraterrestrial civilizations have diminished. But hope remains: it is not yet known to what extent the idea of a magnetar and a Be star corresponds to other FRBs.
—
Online:
Contact us: [email protected]
Our Standards, Terms of Use: Standard Terms And Conditions.