Astronomers from the Breakthrough Listen initiative, the largest ever scientific research program aimed at finding evidence of alien civilizations, have detected a new ‘fast radio burst,’ an extremely powerful radio signal from a distant galaxy.
An artist’s impression of a fast radio burst reaching Earth. Image credit: Jingchuan Yu / Beijing Planetarium.
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are mysterious and rarely detected bursts of energy from space. Scientists estimate that there are between 2,000 and 10,000 FRBs occurring in the sky every day.
These events have durations of milliseconds and exhibit the characteristic dispersion sweep of radio pulsars. They emit as much energy in one millisecond as the Sun emits in 10,000 years, but the physical phenomenon that causes them is unknown.
Less than two dozen FRBs have been detected to date. Most give off only a single burst and do not flash repeatedly.
“While astronomers don’t know all that much about FRBs, we can infer some intriguing details about them,” said Breakthrough Listen project scientist Dr. Danny Price, an astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley.
“Firstly, they exhibit a tell-tale sweep in frequency that suggests they are incredibly far away: billions of light years. FRBs travel billions of years to get to us, and only last a few milliseconds, suggesting the emission mechanism is short-lived. For us to detect them clearly after such a long journey, they have also to be insanely bright.”
“What can produce such bursts? We don’t know yet, but leading theories involve neutron stars and cataclysmic events,” he said. “There’s also a neat theory that they are due to interstellar extraterrestrial travel. We’d love that to be the case, but have to rule out all plausible astrophysical theories first.”
“There is no known astronomical source that generates radio bursts at such a high brightness, which is tens of billions of times brighter than the known population of pulsars, for example,” said Breakthrough Listen and Harvard physicist Professor Avi Loeb.
Detection of FRB 180301 with the Breakthrough Listen backend instrument at CSIRO’s Parkes Radio Telescope: the top panel shows the de-dispersed pulse while the bottom panel shows the frequency structure with the pulse dispersed across 340 MHz of the observed band. Image credit: Breakthrough Listen.
The Breakthrough Listen initiative is foremostly a search for technologically-capable life beyond Earth; however, a real-time search for FRBs runs in tandem.
The new burst, dubbed FRB 180301, was detected on March 1, 2018, at 7:34 a.m. UTC, during Breakthrough Listen observations with the 21-cm multibeam receiver of CSIRO’s Parkes Radio Telescope.
The receiver was centered on J2000 coordinates RA 06:12:43.4, DEC +04:33:44.8.
This is not the first time that the Breakthrough Listen researchers have picked up one of these mysterious and fleeting bursts — in August 2017 FRB 121102, the only FRB known to repeat, was caught in the act by the team using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.
But the FRB180301 event is the first new FRB source that Breakthrough Listen has discovered.
“During our observations at the Parkes Radio Telescope on March 1, 2018, we detected a mysterious and fleeting phenomenon known as a FRB,” Dr. Price said.
“As we did when we caught the only FRB known to repeat, FRB 121102, in the act, we’ve written up initial details in an Astronomer’s Telegram to encourage follow-up observations with other facilities.”
