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Fast radio burst

Astronomical high energy transient pulse

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Observation of the first detected fast radio burst as described by Lorimer et al. (2007). Note that this is the brightest detection. In the Lorimer paper the figure was of the detection in another bea
Psr1909 · CC BY-SA 4.0

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Through Radio wave, Moon and Pulsar

The first FRB was discovered by Duncan Lorimer and his student David Narkevic in 2007 when they were looking through archival pulsar survey data, and it is therefore commonly referred to as the Lorimer burst. Many FRBs have since been recorded, including several that have been detected repeating in seemingly irregular ways. Only one FRB has been detected to repeat in a regular way: FRB 180916 seems to pulse every 16.35 days.

Most FRBs are extragalactic, but the first Milky Way FRB was detected by the CHIME radio telescope in April 2020. In June 2021, astronomers reported over 500 FRBs from outer space detected in one year.

When FRBs are polarized, it indicates that they are emitted from a source contained within an extremely powerful magnetic field. The exact origin and cause of FRBs is still the subject of investigation; proposals for their origin range from a rapidly rotating neutron star and a black hole, to extraterrestrial intelligence. In 2020, astronomers reported narrowing down a source of fast radio bursts, which may now plausibly include "compact-object mergers and magnetars arising from normal core collapse supernovae". A neutron star has been proposed as the origin of an unusual FRB with periodic peaks lasting over 3 seconds reported in 2022.

The discovery in 2012 of the first repeating source, FRB 121102, and its localization and characterization in 2017, has improved the understanding of the source class. FRB 121102 is identified with a galaxy at a distance of approximately three billion light-years and is embedded in an extreme environment. The first host galaxy identified for a non-repeating burst, FRB 180924, was identified in 2019 and is a much larger and more ordinary galaxy, nearly the size of the Milky Way. In August 2019, astronomers reported the detection of eight more repeating FRB signals. In January 2020, astronomers reported the precise location of a second repeating burst, FRB 180916. One FRB seems to have been in the same location as a known gamma-ray burst.

On 28 April 2020, a pair of millisecond-timescale bursts (FRB 200428) consistent with observed fast radio bursts, with a fluence of >1.5 million Jy ms, was detected from the same area of sky as the magnetar SGR 1935+2154. Although it was thousands of times less intrinsically bright than previously observed fast radio bursts, its comparative proximity (within our galaxy) rendered it the most powerful fast radio burst yet observed, reaching a peak flux of either a few thousand or several hundred thousand janskys, comparable to the brightness of the radio sources Cassiopeia A and Cygnus A at the same frequencies. This established magnetars as, at least, one ultimate source of fast radio bursts, although the exact cause remains unknown. Further studies support the notion that magnetars may be closely associated with FRBs. On 13 October 2021, astronomers reported the detection of hundreds of FRBs from a single system.

In 2024, an international team led by astrophysicists of INAF, using detections from VLA, NOEMA interferometer, and Gran Telescopio Canarias has conducted a research campaign about FRB20201124A, one of the two known persistent FRB, located about 1.3 billion light-years away. Based on the outcomes of the study, authors deem to confirm the origin of FRBs in a binary system at high accretion rate, that would blow a plasma bubble, responsible for the persistent radio emission. The emission object, i.e. the "bubble", would be immersed in a star-forming region.

Detection

The first fast radio burst to be described, the Lorimer Burst FRB 010724, was found in 2007 in archived data recorded by the Parkes Observatory on 24 July 2001. Since then, many FRBs have been found in previously recorded data. On 19 January 2015, astronomers at Australia's national science agency (CSIRO) reported that a fast radio burst had been observed for the first time live, by the Parkes Observatory. Many FRBs have been detected in real time by the CHIME radio telescope since it became operational in 2018, including the first FRB detected from within the Milky Way in April 2020.

In January 2025, astronomers discovered radio waves from a galaxy that is roughly 2-billion light years away from Earth and is believed to be more than 11 billion years old. These FRBs are associated with a galaxy that was believed to be dead.

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