Astronomers at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia have identified mysterious and almost imperceptible re-bursts of FRB 171019, according to Science Alert. Initially, the researchers looked for signs of repeats in 20 FRBs (fast radio bursts) using the ASKAP (Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder) radio telescope complex, spending about 12 thousand hours on this. Since the search was unsuccessful, scientists began to observe FRB 171019, whose location in the sky is well known, using other instruments: the Green Bank radio telescope in the United States and the Parks Observatory radio telescope in Australia.
The Green Bank data showed two weak signals. This indicates that repetitive radio bursts are more common than previously thought, and many of the single bursts are in fact related to them, but their signals are simply outside the detection range of the instruments used to detect. Latent signals from FRB 171019 are 590 times weaker than the burst recorded by ASKAP.
Researchers do not yet know what caused the flares, but they found similarities with the activity of magnetars - a type of neutron stars with an extremely strong magnetic field. Although FRBs are a hundred billion times brighter than these objects, scientists believe the results will help refine models that explain the phenomenon of fast radio bursts. A fast radio pulse lasts a few milliseconds and is accompanied by the release of a huge amount of energy into space - the kind that the Sun has been emitting for several tens of thousands of years. One of the hypotheses suggests that this phenomenon is associated with the activities of alien civilizations.