Fast Radio Bursts are a big fat mystery. The pulses — first discovered about a decade ago — come from billions of light years away and last for just milliseconds. Only 16 pulses have been recorded since the first was heard in 2007, but scientists believe they may occur thousands of times a day. But where do they come from?
In a study published recently in Nature, scientists report our first real clue: The most detailed origin story ever obtained for a burst. Their findings suggest that these energetic, seemingly random bursts most likely come from a region dense with either the birth or death of stars.
“Hidden within an incredibly massive data set, we found a very peculiar signal, one that matched all the known characterizes of a Fast Radio Burst, but with a tantalizing extra polarization element that we simply have never seen before,” study author Jeffrey Peterson, a faculty member in Carnegie Mellon’s McWilliams Center for Cosmology, said.
By studying the polarization of the burst (its orientation, which happened to be corkscrewed) and other data gleaned from the signal, the researchers were able to determine that the pulse passed through a strong magnetic field — too strong to be from our own galaxy — and then through two different regions of ionized gas. While the second cloud of gas was likely in the Milky Way, the first was much closer to the pulse’s origin — probably within its own galaxy. That first wave of ionized gas exposure suggests that the pulse came either from a region surrounded by a nebula or from close to the center of its own galaxy.
