{"id":3167822,"date":"2024-01-19T11:27:01","date_gmt":"2024-01-19T16:27:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/?p=3167822"},"modified":"2024-01-19T11:29:08","modified_gmt":"2024-01-19T16:29:08","slug":"four-fast-radio-bursts-3167822","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/four-fast-radio-bursts-3167822\/","title":{"rendered":"Star explosions may be behind mysterious fast radio bursts"},"content":{"rendered":"
Supernovae are the predominant contributors to forming sources that eventually produce fast radio bursts, new research suggests.<\/p>\n
Fast radio bursts (FRBs), fleeting blasts of energy from space, are a cosmic enigma.<\/p>\n
“Fast radio bursts are one of astronomy’s greatest mysteries<\/a>,” says lead author Mohit Bhardwaj, a member of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment Fast Radio Burst (CHIME\/FRB) collaboration and a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University.<\/p>\n “These extremely powerful radio blasts can travel cosmological distances and emit more energy than the sun does in a thousand years, despite lasting only a few thousandths of a second. Even more intriguing is that, though they hit the Earth roughly every minute from all over the sky, their origin is still unknown.”<\/p>\n The researchers examined 18 nearby FRB hosts, all of which were spiral or late-type galaxies. The prevalence of late-type galaxies suggests that FRB sources predominantly occur in relatively young galaxies, with the sources possibly produced by supernovae<\/a> that involve the core collapse of a massive star.<\/p>\n “This work identifies an intriguing trend that suggests most local FRBs likely come from core-collapse supernovae,” says Bridget Andersen, a coauthor of the paper and current PhD student at McGill University working under the supervision of Professor Victoria Kaspi. “In future studies, it will be particularly interesting to see if this trend persists with a larger number of localized host galaxies.”<\/p>\n The work holds particular significance because, a year ago, following the detection of an FRB source in a globular cluster of the Messier 81 galaxy\u2014housing an extremely old stellar population\u2014there was speculation that such sources might dominate the FRB population.<\/p>\n Bhardwaj says that the team’s findings disfavor such a scenario and instead support the hypothesis that the majority of FRB sources originate from the demise of massive stars, often resulting in the formation of either black holes or neutron stars.<\/p>\n “Looking ahead, as we amass larger samples of more precisely observed FRBs, we can further scrutinize these distinctions for both nearby and distant FRBs,” he says.<\/p>\n “By conducting more in-depth analyses, we hope to refine our understanding of the diverse origins of FRBs and potentially unveil the underlying mechanisms that drive these cosmic phenomena, shedding light on the intricacies of the universe’s radio signal bursts.”<\/p>\n