HOME SPACE NEWSSETI Homes In On Fast Radio Burst Source FRB 121102
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AstronomyAstrophysicsBlack HoleCosmologyFast Radio BurstsSETI InstituteUC Berkeley
By UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - BERKELEY JANUARY 10, 2018
The 100-meter Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia is shown amid a starry night. A flash from the Fast Radio Burst source FRB 121102 is seen traveling toward the telescope. The burst shows a complicated structure, with multiple bright peaks; these may be created by the burst emission process itself or imparted by the intervening plasma near the source. This burst was detected using a new recording system developed by the Breakthrough Listen project. Credit: Danielle Futselaar
Recent observations of a mysterious and distant object that emits intermittent bursts of radio waves so bright that they’re visible across the universe provide new data about the source but fail to clear up the mystery of what causes them.
The observations by the Breakthrough Listen team at the University of California, Berkeley
Located in Berkeley, California and founded in 1868, University of California, Berkeley is a public research university that also goes by UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California, or Cal. It maintains close relationships with three DOE National Laboratories: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
" data-gt-translate-attributes="[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-bottom: 1px dotted rgb(0, 0, 0) !important; border-left: 0px; border-image: initial; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none !important; color: rgb(0, 0, 0) !important;">University of California, Berkeley using the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia show that the fast radio bursts from this object, called FRB 121102, are nearly 100 percent linearly polarized, an indication that the source of the bursts is embedded in strong magnetic fields like those around a massive black hole
A black hole is a place in space where the gravitational field is so strong that not even light can escape it. Astronomers classify black holes into three categories by size: miniature, stellar, and supermassive black holes. Miniature black holes could have a mass smaller than our Sun and supermassive black holes could have a mass equivalent to billions of our Sun.
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The measurements confirm observations by another team of astronomers from the Netherlands, which detected the polarized bursts using the William E. Gordon Telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
Both teams will report their findings during a media briefing on January 10th at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C. The results are detailed in a combined paper to be published online the same day by the journal
Nature.
Fast radio bursts are brief, bright pulses of radio emission from distant but so far unknown sources, and FRB 121102 is the only one known to repeat: more than 200 high-energy bursts have been observed coming from this source, which is located in a dwarf galaxy about 3 billion light years from Earth./QUOTE]
Dated 11 July 2022.
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