Scientists detect second repeating radio burst of unknown origin

Scientists detected fast repeating radio bursts from far away in space, prompting speculations about their origin

Short burst of radio waves believed to be from far outside the Milky Way galaxy have been recorded by scientists and presented at the 223^rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, according to a study published in the journal Nature, CNN reported.

While millisecond long radio flashes aren’t rare in space, this is the second one that has repeated itself.

The first rapid burst that repeated was named FRB 121102 and was detected by Arecibo radio telescope in 2015.



The newly recorded radio burst, now named FRB 180814.J0422+73, was detected six times and seemed to come from the same source, about 1.5 billion light years away.

This detection was made possible by a new radio telescope called the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment or CHIME for short. CHIME was still in its test phase when it detected the radio waves and 12 other one-time bursts.

The exact origin of these radio waves or what causes them is unknown but some are speculating that they could be proof of the presence of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations.



Another theory is that astrophysical phenomenon might be triggering the bursts. The latest burst of signals were recorded at a frequency of 400 megahertz, whereas the first burst was recorded at a higher frequency of 700 megahertz.

"[We now know] the sources can produce low-frequency radio waves and those low-frequency waves can escape their environment, and are not too scattered to be detected by the time they reach the Earth," Tom Landecker, a CHIME team member from the National Research Council of Canada, said in a statement. "That tells us something about the environments and the sources. We haven't solved the problem, but it's several more pieces in the puzzle."

The differing frequencies of the two bursts suggest that they could have different places of origin. The 'scattering' phenomenon was detected in the radio bursts, which can help answer questions about the atmosphere surrounding the origin. According to the CHIME team, the phenomenon suggests that the source of origin of the bursts might be powerful astrophysical objects.

"That could mean [the source is] in some sort of dense clump like a supernova remnant," team member Cherry Ng, an astronomer at the University of Toronto, said in a statement. "Or near the central black hole in a galaxy. But it has to be in some special place to give us all the scattering that we see."