A consortium of scientists from MIT and other institutions announced this week that they’ve detected a new radio signal from a galaxy far away—and it’s beaming out into space, from several billion light years away, with a strikingly regular beat.
Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are energetic flashes of radio light that come from deep space, and have remained a mystery to astronomers for years. Sometimes they’re random, and other times they’re more consistent, detected in waves every few days or weeks. Most last for a few milliseconds.
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But this signal, labeled FRB 20191221A, is the longest-lasting FRB with the clearest pattern ever detected. It lasts for three seconds and repeats every 0.2 seconds. The astronomers’ findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“It was unusual,” Daniele Michilli, one of the study’s authors, said in a press release. “Not only was it very long, lasting about three seconds, but there were periodic peaks that were remarkably precise, emitting every fraction of a second—boom, boom, boom—like a heartbeat. This is the first time the signal itself is periodic.”
The origins of fast radio bursts are frequently a mystery for astronomers; anytime something pings in space, people immediately jump to extraterrestrial conclusions. At least one time, those signals were just coming from microwave ovens. But the scientific community’s consensus, generally, is that they come from natural causes, like erupting dead stars, a type of neutron star called “magnetars,” or systems with black holes.
In this case, the researchers write in the paper that this one is likely emission arising from a neutron-star magnetosphere.
“This detection raises the question of what could cause this extreme signal that we’ve never seen before, and how can we use this signal to study the universe,” Michilli said. “Future telescopes promise to discover thousands of FRBs a month, and at that point we may find many more of these periodic signals.”
