Mysterious radio wave flashes from far outside the galaxy are proving tough for astronomers to explain. Is it pulsars? A spy satellite? Or an alien message?

BURSTS of radio waves flashing across the sky seem to follow a mathematical pattern. If the pattern is real, either some strange celestial physics is going on, or the bursts are artificial, produced by human – or alien – technology.

Telescopes have been picking up so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs) since 2001. They last just a few milliseconds and erupt with about as much energy as the sun releases in a month. Ten have been detected so far, most recently in 2014, when the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, caught a burst in action for the first time. The others were found by sifting through data after the bursts had arrived at Earth. No one knows what causes them, but the brevity of the bursts means their source has to be small – hundreds of kilometres across at most – so they can’t be from ordinary stars. And they seem to come from far outside the galaxy.

The weird part is that they all fit a pattern that doesn’t match what we know about cosmic physics.

Scientists have spotted repeated blast of radio signals coming from deep in space.

The breakthrough is only the second time scientists have seen such a repeating radio burst. It both deepens the mystery and offers a potential opportunity to finally understand what might be throwing out the burst from a galaxy billions of light years away.

Fast radio bursts have been speculated to be the result of everything from exploding stars to transmissions from aliens. But they have remained entirely mysterious, with little evidence at all of where they might be coming from.

The flashes only last for a milisecond but they are flung out with the same amount of energy the sun takes 12 months to produce.

Probably most exciting of the new bursts is one that scientists saw repeat six times, apparently from the same location. Of the more than 60 fast radio bursts detected so far, only one of them has ever repeated.

Mysterious 'fast radio bursts' from deep space repeat themselves every 16 days
By Rafi Letzter 21 hours ago

One of the universe's deep mysteries just got a lot stranger. Astrophysicists have discovered a clue that could help explain why, every once in a while, superfast bursts of radio waves flash across Earth from deep space. But the clue — a repeating 16-day pattern in one of the bursts, undermines one of the most popular theories for where the bursts are coming from.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) have likely happened for billions of years. But humans only discovered them in 2007, and have detected only a few dozen of them since. And in June 2019, astronomers finally tracked an FRB to its home galaxy.

But no one knows what causes them. Because these bursts are so rare, unusual and bright — considering that they're visible from billions of light-years across space — physicists have tended to assume they come from a cataclysmic event, such as the collision of stars.

This repeating pattern, however, suggests that something else is going on, that there's some sort of natural machine in the universe for pumping regular shrieks of radio energy across space.

...

The FRB, they found, goes through four-day cycles of regular activity, bleating out radio waves into space on an almost hourly basis. Then it goes into a 12-day period of silence. Sometimes the source seems to skip its usual four-day awake periods, or lets out only a single burst. CHIME/FRB is able to watch the FRB only some of the time, they noted, so it's likely the detector misses many FRBs during the awake period.

No one knows what this pattern means, the researchers noted in a statement, but this pattern doesn't fit neatly into any existing explanations for FRBs.

...

but the sound level is low here.

Spearthrower wrote:The message is: dinner at mine Tuesday, rsvp.

Spearthrower wrote:The message is: dinner at mine Tuesday, rsvp.

Fast radio bursts could be distant magnetars, new evidence suggests

A bright flare recently detected from a magnetic neutron star in our galaxy might help reveal one of the greatest mysteries in modern astronomy: What are FRBs?

By Yvette Cendes | Published: Monday, May 4, 2020

...

It is far too early to draw a firm conclusion about whether this relatively faint FRB-like signal is the first example of a galactic fast radio burst — making it the smoking gun to unlocking the entire FRB mystery. And there are also still many preliminary questions left to answer. For example, how often do these fainter bursts happen? Are they beamed so not all radiation is equally bright in all directions? Do they fall on a spectrum of FRBs with varying intensities, or are they something entirely new? And how are the X-ray data connected?

These are the questions that need to be understood and further analyzed before a definitive conclusion can be made. But until then, astronomers are excited to know this latest burst may finally lead to an answer to the years-long mystery about the origin of FRBs. And until they have that answer, they will keep scanning the skies for bursts both near and far.

Mysterious Repeating Radio Burst From Space Is Back, Exactly Right on Time

We'll see it again in around 160 days. So what the hell is it?

...more @ link above