Astronomers find 25 extremely powerful radio bursts

Like gravitational waves (GWs) and gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one of the most powerful and mysterious astronomical phenomena of our time. These transients consist of flares that release more energy in milliseconds than the Sun does in three days. Although most eruptions last only milliseconds, there have been rare occurrences of repeated FRBs. While astronomers are still unsure of what causes them and opinions differ, private observatories and international cooperation have significantly increased the number of events available for study.

The leading observatory is the Canadian Hydrogen Density Mapping Experiment (CHIME), a next-generation radio telescope located at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) in British Columbia, Canada. With its wide field of view and wide frequency coverage, this telescope is an indispensable tool for detecting FRBs (over 1000 resources today!).

Using a new type of algorithm, the CHIME/FRB collaboration found evidence of 25 new FRBs recurring in the CHIME data detected between 2019 and 2021. The CHIME/FRB collaboration includes astronomers and astrophysicists from Canada, the United States, Australia, Taiwan and India.

Its partner institutions include DRAO, Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (DI), Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), Anton Pannekuk Institute for Astronomy, National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics. , the National Center for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA) and the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR) and numerous universities and institutes.

Despite their mysterious nature, FRBs are ubiquitous, and by best estimates, events reach Earth through the sky about a thousand times a day. None of the theories or models proposed to date can fully explain all the properties of eruptions or springs.

Some are believed to originate from neutron stars and black holes (due to the high energy density in their environment), while others continue to escape classification. Therefore, other theories persist, ranging from pulsars and magnetars to gamma-ray bursts and extraterrestrial communication.

CHIME was originally designed to measure the expansion history of the universe by detecting neutral hydrogen. About 370,000 years after the Big Bang, this gas permeated the universe and single photons were released either by residual radiation from the Big Bang – the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – or by neutral hydrogen atoms.

For this reason, astronomers and cosmologists refer to this period as the “Dark Ages”, which ended about 1 billion years after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies began to re-ionize neutral hydrogen (the Reionization Age). CHIME was specifically designed to detect the wavelength of light that neutral hydrogen absorbs and emits, known as the 21 cm hydrogen line. This way, astronomers can measure how fast the universe expanded during the “dark ages” and compare it to later observable cosmological epochs.

However, CHIME has proven ideal for studying FRBs due to its wide field of view and the frequency range it covers (400 to 800 MHz). This is the goal of the CHIME/FRB collaboration to detect, characterize, and monitor FRBs.

As Dunlap researcher and lead author Ziggy Pleunis told Universe Today, each FRB is defined by its position in the sky and a quantity known as the dispersion measure (DM). This refers to the time delay from high frequencies to low frequencies caused by the interaction of the flash with the material as it travels through space.