Quick radio burst
For the past five years, researchers have been closely following a strange radio signal from deep space.
Astronomers refer to these surprising signals as “fast radio bursts”, as FRBs. They are pulses of radio waves that last only fractions of a second – and to this day, their origin remains a mystery.
FRB 121102
Since the discovery of FRBs, researchers have found that one particular signal, called FRB 121102, repeated as clockwork, appeared 90 days before they were dormant for the next 67 days.
Astronomers have repeatedly found this roughness of 157 days. And that gave her the ability to predict when it would return.
I’ll be back
And just as predicted, a team of astronomers led by Marilyn Cruces of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy rediscovered the FRB 121102 signal, as detailed in a preprint uploaded to the preprint archive arXiv earlier this month.
“We predict the resource to be active from 2020-07-09 to 2020-10-14 and, in retrospect, from 2020-12-17 to 2021-03-24,” reads the preprint.
The mysterious signal has captured the attention of several teams of scientists, as well Science Alert reports. A team in China also monitored it with the 500-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope at the National Astronomy Observatory of China.
READ MORE: A mysterious radio burst from space is back, just on schedule [CNET]
More about FRBs: A dead star revealed what scientists have never seen before
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