While searching for pulsars with the Large Phased Array (LPA) radio telescope, Russian astronomers discovered a bright pulse at 111 MHz that appeared to be a fast radio burst event. The discovery was reported in a research paper published on the preprocessing server on October 17. arXiv.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are intense bursts of radio emission lasting milliseconds that exhibit the characteristic distribution of radio pulsars. The physical nature of these bursts is still unknown, and astronomers are considering a variety of explanations, from maser synchrotron radiation from young magnetars in supernova remnants to cosmic string ends.

In general, FRBs are discrete pulses ranging in duration from 0.08 to 26 milliseconds, with dispersion figures typically ranging from 109 to 2600 pc/cm.³. Among devices capable of detecting pulses with these characteristics, LPA is one of the most sensitive radio telescopes operating at meter wavelengths.

Recently, a group of astronomers led by Sergey Tyulbashev from the Pushchin Radio Astronomy Observatory in Russia discovered an interesting pulse that may be an FRB. The discovery was made as part of the Pushchino Multibeam Pulsar Search (PUMPS) project during the technical assessment of the quality of observations carried out by the LPA of the Lebedev Physical Institute (LPI).

The detected pulse lasted 211 milliseconds and had a dispersion measure of approximately 134.4 pc/cm.³ and peak flux density at 20 Yang. The large scale of the momentum distribution suggests its extragalactic origin and corresponds to a luminosity distance of approximately 2.3 billion light-years.

According to the paper, the resulting features indicate that the observed pulse was one of the most powerful fast radio bursts, and astronomers named it FRB 20190203. Astronomers note that no repeat radio bursts from FRB 20190203 have been detected so far. Activity was observed in the gamma range.

If the nature of FRB 20190203 is confirmed, it will be the first explosion of extragalactic origin detected by the PUMPS probe. It is also the second FRB detected at such a low frequency (111 MHz) and the first among non-repetitive FRBs.

Regarding the origin of FRB 20190203, the study’s authors propose a synchrotron maser emission scenario.

“In our view, the observed properties of FRB 20190203 are best explained by the magnetar-excited synchrotron maser source model,” the researchers concluded.