A group of canadian astronomers report the discovery of a second set of “Fast radio burst” or FRB’s. For several years these FRB’s have been broadcasting from well outside our galaxy. A high number of these FRB’s have already been recorded with some FRB broadcasting plots originating over the same location as previous origin plots which are classified as “Repeaters”.
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repeaters may be rare in the FRB population. Here we report the detection of six repeat bursts from FRB 180814.J0422+73, one of the 13 FRBs detected by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) FRB project during its pre-commissioning phase in July and August 2018. These repeat bursts are consistent with its origin from a single position on the sky, with the same dispersion measure, about 189 parsecs per cubic centimetre.
The CHIME/FRB Collaboration
the team found the source of the first repeating FRB’s emitting from a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years away. Whatever is causing these bursts must be incredibly intense. Each FRB has about 25 million times more energy than our Sun, packed into just a millisecond, according to the team. “And that’s astounding,” They wonder “What is it that is getting that much energy out?” A popular idea is that these bursts are coming from some type of super dense object, like a black hole. Many think they may actually come from a special type of corpse star known as a magnetar, which has a very powerful magnetic field but because of the short millisecond duration, It seems likely that the source is only a few hundred kilometers in size.
