{"id":62716,"date":"2024-08-25T07:22:00","date_gmt":"2024-08-25T07:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/27fdf711-f91c-439d-80d3-9d2f256aee78"},"modified":"2024-08-25T07:39:41","modified_gmt":"2024-08-25T07:39:41","slug":"mysterious-fast-radio-bursts-from-deep-space-seem-to-be-repeating-and-the-culprit-could-be-light-bending-gravity","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/rss_feed\/mysterious-fast-radio-bursts-from-deep-space-seem-to-be-repeating-and-the-culprit-could-be-light-bending-gravity\/","title":{"rendered":"Mysterious fast radio bursts from deep space seem to be repeating, and the culprit could be light-bending gravity"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>

By <\/p>

Published: Sunday, 25 August 2024 at 07:22 AM<\/p>

\n\n

The creators of Canada\u2019s CHIME radio telescope didn\u2019t know what they were getting into.<\/p>

The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (to give it its full name) was designed to observe large swathes of the sky to efficiently produce a map of hydrogen over a substantial portion of the Universe.<\/p>

But it turns out to be almost perfectly designed to catch unusual rapid bursts of radio waves, known as fast radio bursts<\/a>.<\/p>

Radio pulses may arrive more than once if they\u2019re bent on their journey through space. Credit: CHIME\/FRB Collaboration with artistic additions by Luka Vlaji\u0107<\/figcaption><\/figure>
Fast radio bursts were first discovered in 2007, but while CHIME was under construction between 2015 and 2017, astronomers looking through archival data had realised the events were far more common than anyone expected.<\/p>
Now CHIME has seen thousands of these bursts \u2013 but they remain mysterious.\u00a0<\/p>
One of the unusual things is their diversity. Fast radio bursts occur at different frequencies, last anything from a few milliseconds to a few seconds, and while some repeat, others do not.<\/p>
CHIME has seen precisely one fast radio burst that seemed to come from the Milky Way, but others seem to originate in galaxies<\/a> billions of lightyears<\/a> away.<\/p>
With a rapidly growing catalogue of such objects (plus all that hydrogen still to map), the CHIME team have been kept busy.<\/p>
But others are now poring over the telescope\u2019s rich datasets, and a study by a collaboration of astronomers in China and Australia seems to have found something interesting in CHIME\u2019s collection of repeating fast radio bursts.<\/p>
$\"An$
An artist\u2019s impression showing part of the cosmic web, a structure of galaxies extending across the sky. The bright blue flashes are the signals from Fast Radio Bursts. Credit: M. Weiss\/CfA<\/figcaption><\/figure>
**Gravitational lensing<\/strong><\/h2>**The team set out to test an old idea: that fast radio bursts could be affected by gravitational lensing<\/a>.<\/p>
Lensing is the process by which light is bent by gravity, which you\u2019ll have seen in images of distorted galaxies from the Hubble Space Telescope<\/a> and James Webb Space Telescope<\/a>.<\/p>
Normally, the light from a distant galaxy is bent by passing close to a nearby galaxy or cluster, but smaller, massive objects \u2013 passing black holes<\/a> or free-floating planets, say \u2013 can have a lensing effect too.\u00a0<\/p>
$\"Quasar$
Quasar G2237, cloned four times by gravitational lensing. Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI<\/figcaption><\/figure>
Such \u2018microlensing\u2019 leads to a brightening of a background source, but it can also cause a delay in light arriving at Earth, though how long such a delay might be depends on the situation.<\/p>
Different paths around the lens take different times, so rather than see a single fast radio burst, we\u2019d receive radio waves from the same burst several times, like seeing several different reflections of yourself in a funhouse mirror.<\/p>
The team used a machine-learning technique to check for similarities between different bursts from the same repeating fast radio burst.<\/p>
They hoped to show that rather than truly repeating \u2013 something that\u2019s difficult to explain if whatever is causing these events is highly energetic and probably destructive \u2013 lensing is transforming a single burst into something we see more than once.<\/p>
They studied 42 fast radio bursts and found one from 2019 that might be a lens.<\/p>
$\"Hubble$
Hubble image identifying four fast radio bursts in the spiral arms of four distant galaxies. Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Mannings (UC Santa Cruz), W. Fong (Northwestern), A. Pagan (STScI)<\/figcaption><\/figure>
Its bursts were similar enough to look suspicious, though they\u2019re not identical \u2013 presumably due to distortion from their passage around the lensing object.\u00a0<\/p>
More observations, and more radio bursts, are needed before anyone is convinced of this result. It may be that lensing is a red herring and the similarity between bursts just a coincidence.<\/p>
Luckily, CHIME is still scanning the sky and there will be another burst along in a minute.<\/p>
***Chris Lintottwas reading <\/em>A Lensed FRB Candidate in the First CHIME\/FRB Catalogue and its Potential Implications by Chenming Chang et al. Read it online at:*** ***arxiv.org\/abs\/2406.19654<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p> <\/body><\/html>\n***
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By Published: Sunday, 25 August 2024 at 07:22 AM The creators of Canada\u2019s CHIME radio telescope didn\u2019t know what they were getting into. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (to give it its full name) was designed to observe large swathes of the sky to efficiently produce a map of hydrogen over a substantial portion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":62717,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"4"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/mysterious-fast-radio-bursts-from-deep-space-seem-to-be-repeating-and-the-culprit-could-be-light-bending-gravity.jpg",1200,800,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/mysterious-fast-radio-bursts-from-deep-space-seem-to-be-repeating-and-the-culprit-could-be-light-bending-gravity-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/mysterious-fast-radio-bursts-from-deep-space-seem-to-be-repeating-and-the-culprit-could-be-light-bending-gravity-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/mysterious-fast-radio-bursts-from-deep-space-seem-to-be-repeating-and-the-culprit-could-be-light-bending-gravity-768x512.jpg",768,512,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/mysterious-fast-radio-bursts-from-deep-space-seem-to-be-repeating-and-the-culprit-could-be-light-bending-gravity-1024x683.jpg",800,534,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/mysterious-fast-radio-bursts-from-deep-space-seem-to-be-repeating-and-the-culprit-could-be-light-bending-gravity.jpg",1200,800,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/mysterious-fast-radio-bursts-from-deep-space-seem-to-be-repeating-and-the-culprit-could-be-light-bending-gravity.jpg",1200,800,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"By Published: Sunday, 25 August 2024 at 07:22 AM The creators of Canada\u2019s CHIME radio telescope didn\u2019t know what they were getting into. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (to give it its full name) was designed to observe large swathes of the sky to efficiently produce a map of hydrogen over a substantial portion…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/62716"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}

Radio pulses may arrive more than once if they\u2019re bent on their journey through space. Credit: CHIME\/FRB Collaboration with artistic additions by Luka Vlaji\u0107<\/figcaption><\/figure>
Fast radio bursts were first discovered in 2007, but while CHIME was under construction between 2015 and 2017, astronomers looking through archival data had realised the events were far more common than anyone expected.<\/p>
Now CHIME has seen thousands of these bursts \u2013 but they remain mysterious.\u00a0<\/p>
One of the unusual things is their diversity. Fast radio bursts occur at different frequencies, last anything from a few milliseconds to a few seconds, and while some repeat, others do not.<\/p>
CHIME has seen precisely one fast radio burst that seemed to come from the Milky Way, but others seem to originate in galaxies<\/a> billions of lightyears<\/a> away.<\/p>
With a rapidly growing catalogue of such objects (plus all that hydrogen still to map), the CHIME team have been kept busy.<\/p>
But others are now poring over the telescope\u2019s rich datasets, and a study by a collaboration of astronomers in China and Australia seems to have found something interesting in CHIME\u2019s collection of repeating fast radio bursts.<\/p>
$\"An$
An artist\u2019s impression showing part of the cosmic web, a structure of galaxies extending across the sky. The bright blue flashes are the signals from Fast Radio Bursts. Credit: M. Weiss\/CfA<\/figcaption><\/figure>
**Gravitational lensing<\/strong><\/h2>**The team set out to test an old idea: that fast radio bursts could be affected by gravitational lensing<\/a>.<\/p>
Lensing is the process by which light is bent by gravity, which you\u2019ll have seen in images of distorted galaxies from the Hubble Space Telescope<\/a> and James Webb Space Telescope<\/a>.<\/p>
Normally, the light from a distant galaxy is bent by passing close to a nearby galaxy or cluster, but smaller, massive objects \u2013 passing black holes<\/a> or free-floating planets, say \u2013 can have a lensing effect too.\u00a0<\/p>
$\"Quasar$
Quasar G2237, cloned four times by gravitational lensing. Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI<\/figcaption><\/figure>
Such \u2018microlensing\u2019 leads to a brightening of a background source, but it can also cause a delay in light arriving at Earth, though how long such a delay might be depends on the situation.<\/p>
Different paths around the lens take different times, so rather than see a single fast radio burst, we\u2019d receive radio waves from the same burst several times, like seeing several different reflections of yourself in a funhouse mirror.<\/p>
The team used a machine-learning technique to check for similarities between different bursts from the same repeating fast radio burst.<\/p>
They hoped to show that rather than truly repeating \u2013 something that\u2019s difficult to explain if whatever is causing these events is highly energetic and probably destructive \u2013 lensing is transforming a single burst into something we see more than once.<\/p>
They studied 42 fast radio bursts and found one from 2019 that might be a lens.<\/p>
$\"Hubble$
Hubble image identifying four fast radio bursts in the spiral arms of four distant galaxies. Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Mannings (UC Santa Cruz), W. Fong (Northwestern), A. Pagan (STScI)<\/figcaption><\/figure>
Its bursts were similar enough to look suspicious, though they\u2019re not identical \u2013 presumably due to distortion from their passage around the lensing object.\u00a0<\/p>
More observations, and more radio bursts, are needed before anyone is convinced of this result. It may be that lensing is a red herring and the similarity between bursts just a coincidence.<\/p>
Luckily, CHIME is still scanning the sky and there will be another burst along in a minute.<\/p>
***Chris Lintottwas reading <\/em>A Lensed FRB Candidate in the First CHIME\/FRB Catalogue and its Potential Implications by Chenming Chang et al. Read it online at:*** ***arxiv.org\/abs\/2406.19654<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p> <\/body><\/html>\n***
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By Published: Sunday, 25 August 2024 at 07:22 AM The creators of Canada\u2019s CHIME radio telescope didn\u2019t know what they were getting into. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (to give it its full name) was designed to observe large swathes of the sky to efficiently produce a map of hydrogen over a substantial portion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":62717,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"4"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/mysterious-fast-radio-bursts-from-deep-space-seem-to-be-repeating-and-the-culprit-could-be-light-bending-gravity.jpg",1200,800,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/mysterious-fast-radio-bursts-from-deep-space-seem-to-be-repeating-and-the-culprit-could-be-light-bending-gravity-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/mysterious-fast-radio-bursts-from-deep-space-seem-to-be-repeating-and-the-culprit-could-be-light-bending-gravity-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/mysterious-fast-radio-bursts-from-deep-space-seem-to-be-repeating-and-the-culprit-could-be-light-bending-gravity-768x512.jpg",768,512,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/mysterious-fast-radio-bursts-from-deep-space-seem-to-be-repeating-and-the-culprit-could-be-light-bending-gravity-1024x683.jpg",800,534,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/mysterious-fast-radio-bursts-from-deep-space-seem-to-be-repeating-and-the-culprit-could-be-light-bending-gravity.jpg",1200,800,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/77\/2024\/08\/mysterious-fast-radio-bursts-from-deep-space-seem-to-be-repeating-and-the-culprit-could-be-light-bending-gravity.jpg",1200,800,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"By Published: Sunday, 25 August 2024 at 07:22 AM The creators of Canada\u2019s CHIME radio telescope didn\u2019t know what they were getting into. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (to give it its full name) was designed to observe large swathes of the sky to efficiently produce a map of hydrogen over a substantial portion…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/62716"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcskyatnight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}