Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts Traced to Dwarf Galaxy in the Auriga

>What all the observed FRBs share, however, is a curious smearing-out of their frequencies that matches expectations for how clouds of electrons in deep space would alter the propagation of radio waves journeying through the cosmos. The bigger the smear, the more plasma—ionized gas—an FRB’s waves must have passed through. To date, all detected FRBs display smears greater than what could be easily produced by all the interstellar plasma in our galaxy. This hints that their light has traveled to us across billions of light-years, and that they are among the most luminous phenomena in the universe. If so, astronomers could use FRBs to study new frontiers of high-energy astrophysics and to map the uncharted realms of rarefied, magnetized plasma that suffuse intergalactic space. But denser, closer regions of plasma—like those in the outer layers of flaring stars or in shells of debris surrounding supernovae—could conceivably smear an FRB’s light, too. This leads some researchers to suspect they are actually produced by much more prosaic astrophysical processes right here in our Milky Way or other nearby galaxies, and thus much less promising as new tools for probing the universe’s large-scale structure.

>Much is at stake in this great cosmic mystery. Solving it requires pinpointing an FRB’s source to see whether it comes from a distant galaxy, a nearby star or somewhere in between. A key clue emerged in 2016 when astronomers using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico reported a repeating FRB, dubbed FRB 121102, sporadically pinging away in the constellation Auriga. That gave researchers a target to scrutinize, and indicated that at least some FRBs are caused by processes that do not result in the cataclysmic destruction of the source.
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>But whether the repeating FRB’s source was nearby or very far away remained elusive; preliminary investigations could only constrain the source to a relatively large patch of sky as seen from Earth that was one tenth the diameter of the full moon, and packed with stars and background galaxies. But now, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Grapevine, Texas, an international team of astronomers announced they have pinpointed the source, marshaling a global network of radio telescopes to trace an FRB to an enigmatic dwarf galaxy billions of light-years distant. Their findings were published January 4 in Nature and in two additional papers in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Collectively, these studies all but confirm a decade of speculation that most—probably all—FRBs are extremely bright and energetic events seen across vast cosmic distances.

>Led by Cornell University senior research associate, Shami Chatterjee, the team used the Arecibo telescope and the Very Large Array in New Mexico to monitor multiple bursts from FRB 121102. Next they paired with another team helmed by Benito Marcote of the Joint Institute for VLBI in the Netherlands, using the European Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network of radio telescopes to pinpoint the source to a region of the sky just a hundred-millionth the diameter of the full moon. In the process they also detected a weak, persistent radio emission within 100 light-years of the powerful FRB events. Finally, the two groups worked with a third team, led by Shriharsh Tendulkar of McGill University in Montreal, to zoom in on the source’s location in the sky using the optical Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii, spying a tiny smudge of light that looked to be a dwarf galaxy more than three billion light-years away.

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>“This is the breakthrough everyone wanted,” says James Cordes, a radio astronomer at Cornell and co-author of two of the studies. “It has broken a logjam of speculation,” he says, adding that FRB 121102 “serves as a prototype for all FRBs until we are compelled to think otherwise.”

>According to Chatterjee, Cordes and their co-authors, if this particular extragalactic FRB is indeed representative of all others, it rules out all theories positing FRBs as the product of processes in or around our Milky Way. It would also eliminate all models relying on the one-off cataclysmic explosions or mergers of various types of stars, and would suggest all FRBs will repeat if monitored long enough. The result dictates an agenda for future FRB studies as ambitious as it is necessary, for the discovery of FRB 121102’s cosmic home raises as many questions as it answers. To learn the true nature of FRBs, this seemingly singular repeater would demand even greater scrutiny, and all previously observed FRBs would need to be reexamined for signs of repeats. Most importantly, new networks of high-resolution, wide-field radio telescopes would need to be built to perform all-sky FRB surveys to rapidly detect and localize the elusive eruptions as they occur across the universe. If more are found to repeat and are localized to distant dwarf galaxies, a paradigm-shifting new era of cosmological discovery may be at hand; if not, the curious behavior of FRB 121102 may become just another cosmic cold case in the annals of astronomy’s history.
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>For now, Derek Fox, an astronomer at The Pennsylvania State University unaffiliated with the team’s studies, is skeptical that FRB 121102’s repetition can be reconciled with that of another FRB that his team reported late last year. Called FRB 131104, this event appeared to emit a minutes-long blast of gamma rays a billion times more energetic than its milliseconds-long radio pulse. “Among our group, we tend to feel that the much more demanding energy requirements for the gamma-ray emission from FRB 131104 suggest that it cannot be a repeating source,” Fox says, because its progenitor would be destroyed by the process. “So at least two populations [of FRBs] are required, with luminous gamma-ray emission coming only from some fraction of the nonrepeating FRBs.”

>Chatterjee acknowledges there could be multiple types of FRBs—some repeating, some not. “So far, we’re reasoning from a sample of one,” he says. “But certainly the more economical explanation is that we’ve just been unlucky with other FRBs so far, and all of them are capable of repeating. If not, we have two (or more) fun mysteries on our hands instead of one!”

>There are only a handful of plausible explanations left for FRB 121102’s mysterious repetitions, but none are without problems. Cordes says some of this FRB’s staccato repetitions might be illusory, created by swirling clouds of plasma magnifying or masking a possibly continuous (yet still very mysterious) radio emission from some unknown source.
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>Presuming instead that the repetitions are intrinsic to this FRB’s source, outbursts from young, highly magnetized neutron stars called “magnetars” could explain such behavior—as could jets expelled from a supermassive black hole gorging on gas and dust at a galaxy’s core. Some hybrid theories even propose that FRBs could be produced by interactions between these two exotic astrophysical objects, and the immediate environment around either a feeding black hole or a newborn neutron star could also produce the persistent background radio emission that appears to underlie the episodic flare-ups from FRB 121102.

>The trouble is, neutron stars and supermassive black holes are each typically found in large galaxies—not in small ones like this newly discovered dwarf, which is estimated to be 10 times smaller and a thousand times lighter than our own Milky Way. Furthermore, a supermassive black hole would be expected to lurk near a galaxy’s center, but the outbursts of FRB 121102 appear to originate from the dwarf galaxy’s periphery. Conversely, dwarf galaxies tend to possess greater amounts of pristine primordial gas than larger galaxies do, which promotes the formation of very massive stars. When these stars die, they can create long-duration gamma-ray bursts and superluminous supernovae—cataclysmic explosions that can be seen clear across the universe. FRB 121102’s location in a dwarf galaxy could suggest its repeating outbursts are somehow related to these other energetic and far more destructive events. Or, instead, it could imply astronomers are still missing something fundamental in their analyses.
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>These accumulating inconsistencies make some experts question whether FRB 121102’s “dwarf galaxy” is really a galaxy at all, or perhaps something stranger and less familiar to science. Steady, compact radio sources like the one detected by Chatterjee and colleagues “are unheard of in such small galaxies,” says Vikram Ravi, a California Institute of Technology astronomer who was not involved with the team’s work. “The takeaway is this,” Ravi says. “A persistent counterpart to [FRB 121102] has been identified, and it is unlike any source we’ve previously known about.”

>In a commentary accompanying the Nature paper, Heino Falcke, an astronomer at Radboud University in the Netherlands, speculated that instead of a dwarf galaxy, the object might be “the nucleus of a disrupted galaxy,” “an isolated black hole” or “an exploding star ‘disguised’ to look like a black hole.” Amid that uncertainty, Falcke wrote that for now, “Chatterjee and colleagues, and the rest of the astrophysics community, are left scratching their heads.”

TLDR anyone?
Is it aliens?

>>97602
At very least it's a natural process that hasn't ever been observed before.

>>97602
Not saying it might be aliens
But its aliens

>>97619
boring I want sex aliums

Oh wow! I first read about this in a technical discussion about SETI in the early 90's. During the followup searches after the "Wow" signal detection, receivers were picking up these seemingly random short lived pulses from all over the sky. As time progressed they realized that the pulses seemed to avoid the areas above and below the galactic barycenter, indicating a previously unknown natural phenomena.

Very cool. The Space News app is all over this.

>>97636
Can you source the galactic barycenter bit?

If that's true, that pretty much guarantees these things are extragalactic

>>97661
Hi anon, sorry for the delay. I don't have the book available to me at the moment but I am heading to our library tomorrow. I will see if they have it and get you more details.

It's in the book "First Contact" by Ben Bova & Byron Priess. (1990). It will be in the chapter about the "Wow" signal about mid-way in the book. It describes them as s narrow-band pulse up to 1 kHz wide and lasting a couple of seconds at most. No actual RF frequencies given, unfortunately, so I would assume in the L-band around the Hydrogen and hydroxyl emissions where SETI researchers traditionally like to listen.

I haven't read my copy in 3 years when I put my stuff in storage (job has me mobile).

>>97661
Oh I forgot to also mention that the author of that chapter said that researchers mapping the approximate locations (they describe them as "bumps in the night") theorize that an extra-galactic source was possibly interacting with the galactic medium and causing these brief "bumps." That seems to me to lend credence to your comment about the source(s) originating from beyond our galaxy.

Fascinating huh? I love radio astronomy and its disciplines and follow it closely through various literature and sources. On its own we get more science out of RA than we do the optical stuff but it doesn't get much publicity probably because it doesn't "look pretty."

So there's aliens and can we have sex with it?

>>97619
Odds are it's just a new phenomenon or slightly different variety coming from a magnetar, quasar or pulsar.

>>97636
>seemingly random
I was under the assumption that the regularity was what got SETI so interested in them.

Rotating cosmic bodies that emit radiation in pulses is not something new.

Lol @ you faggots thinking aliens are real.

>>97636
>>97811

Those weren't FRBs. They've seen less than 24, and only started grouping them in the 2000s.

>>97945
If you knew what any of those words meant, you wouldn't be using them.

>>98009
http://mnrasl.oxfordjournals.org/content/450/1/L71

>>97948
If it's rotating, then why isn't it periodic?

>>98002
Probably not aliens, but the fact that you can replicate them by opening up a microwave door before the timer runs out is certainly interesting.

>>97833
Try to have sex with human first

So I just read it as useless welfare queen scientist soaking up loan money for stupid ass projects. Does anyone seriously care about shit trillions of miles away? How will this FSB crap help us humans on Earth out? It's a waste of money, and it's why people in America don't respect scientist and are kicking them out.

>>99964
Lmao please stop

We can spend money exploring cool shit.