Mysterious bursts of radio waves originating from billions of light
years away have left the scientists who detected them speculating about
their origins.
The international research team, writing in the journal Science, rule
out terrestrial sources for the four fast radio bursts and say their
brightness and distance suggest they come from cosmological distances
when the Universe was just half its current age.
The burst energetics indicate that they originate from an extreme
astrophysical event involving relativistic objects such as neutron stars
or black holes.
Study lead Dan Thornton, a PhD student at England’s University of
Manchester and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial
Research Organisation, said the findings pointed to some extreme events
involving large amounts of mass or energy as the source of the radio
bursts.
He said: “A single burst of radio emission of unknown origin was
detected outside our Galaxy about six years ago but no one was certain
what it was or even if it was real, so we have spent the last four years
searching for more of these explosive, short-duration radio bursts.
This paper describes four more bursts, removing any doubt that they are
real. The radio bursts last for just a few milliseconds and the furthest
one that we detected was several billion light years away.”
Astonishingly, the findings – taken from a tiny fraction of the sky –
also suggest that there should be one of these signals going off every
10 seconds. Max-Planck Institute Director and Manchester’s Professor
Michael Kramer explained: “The bursts last only a tenth of the blink of
an eye. With current telescopes we need to be lucky to look at the right
spot at the right time. But if we could view the sky with ‘radio eyes’
there would be flashes going off all over the sky every day.”
The team, which included researchers from the UK, Germany, Italy,
Australia and the US, used the CSIRO Parkes 64metre radio telescope in
Australia to obtain their results.
Co-author Professor Matthew Bailes, from the Swinburne University of
Technology in Melbourne, thinks the origin of these explosive bursts may
be from magnetic neutron stars, known as ‘magnetars’. He said:
“Magnetars can give off more energy in a millisecond than our Sun does
in 300,000 years and are a leading candidate for the burst.”
The researchers say their results will also provide a way of finding out
the properties of space between the Earth and where the bursts
occurred.
Author Dr Ben Stappers, from Manchester’s School of Physics and
Astronomy, said: “We are still not sure about what makes up the space
between galaxies, so we will be able to use these radio bursts like
probes in order to understand more about some of the missing matter in
the Universe. We are now starting to use Parkes and other telescopes,
like the Lovell Telescope of the University of Manchester, to look for
these bursts in real time.”
Notes for Editors
A copy of the paper, ‘A Population of Fast Radio Bursts at Cosmological Distances,’ published in Science on 5 July 2013, is available under embargo conditions on request.
An artist’s impression of the radio wave bursts and the CSIRO Parkes radio telescope in Australia, as well as a short video of three bursts going off in the night sky, is available here: http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/production/parkes/ (Credit: Swinburne Astronomy Productions)
The institutions involved in the collaboration were the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Observatory, the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, Bonn, the INAF-Cagliari Astronomical Observatory and the Cagliari University, Sardinia, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Sydney, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO), Curtin University, Western Australia, West Virginia University, US, and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California.
Contacts
Aeron Haworth
Media Relations
Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences
The University of Manchester
Tel: 0161 275 8387
Mob: 07717 881563
Email: aeron.haworth@manchester.ac.uk
