A team of researchers used data from the world’s largest radio telescope to find a circular polarization in active, repeated fast radio bursts — something never seen before in FRBs. The discovery could help reveal the nature of one of the universe’s most mysterious events.
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Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are flashes so intense that they can surpass the energy produced by the Sun in a month, or even a year. They come from deep space, but astronomers still don’t know how and why.
Some of these bursts last just a few milliseconds and disappear forever, but other, rarer ones—less than 5% of FRBs ever identified—repeat, making the mystery even more intriguing.
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The first known repeater flash is cataloged as FRB20121102A, while the first known persistently active repeater is FRB20190520B. The 500-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) provided data from active episodes of both events, with details of the polarization of these radio signals.
Carrying important information about waves in the electromagnetic spectrum, polarization is one of the fundamental properties of light and other types of emissions — such as radio itself. Many light sources, such as the Sun, emit unpolarized light, but linear polarization was found in all repeated FRBs.
Previously, FRB20201124A (discovered after the other two mentioned above) was the first case of a repeating FRB showing circular polarity. If we consider all types of fast radio bursts, circular polarization was found in 5% of detected events.
Now, to the scientists’ surprise, FAST has revealed a circular polarization in both FRB20121102A and FRB20190520B. With these findings, the number of repeat FRBs with this property rose from one (20201124A) to three.
It may seem like little, but there are also few samples of repeated radio bursts. This suggests that, perhaps, this characteristic is present in many more repeated FRBs than previously imagined. It could even be something common.
A deeper analysis of the polarization using FAST can help to obtain more conclusive results about the subject and even about the FRB mechanisms themselves, bringing scientists closer to solving the mystery about the origin of these events.
The article describing the findings was published in Science Bulletin??
Read the article on Canaltech.
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