For the first time, astronomers from the Breakthrough Listen project have recorded several repetitions of the mysterious FRB 121102 radio signal at once, the source of which is believed to be in a galaxy three billion light years from Earth, according to the press service of the Breakthrough Initiative.
“We have been observing the alleged sources of FRB flares as part of our program to search for traces of extraterrestrial intelligence in nearby stars. Early Saturday morning, August 26, astronomer Vishal Gayjar of the University of California at Berkeley observed FRB 121102 with a telescope at Green Banks. In total, he and other project participants managed to record 15 new outbreaks emanating from FRB 121102, which confirmed that the source exists, and revealed several previously unknown features of it,”the foundation says.
For the first time, astronomers started talking about the existence of mysterious bursts of radio emission (fast radio-burst, FRB) in 2007, when they were accidentally discovered during observations of radio pulsars with the Parks telescope (Australia).
In subsequent years, scientists managed to find traces of nine more such bursts, a comparison of which showed that they can be of artificial origin and even potentially be signals of extraterrestrial civilizations due to the inexplicable periodicity in their structure.
In the spring of the year before last, scientists found out that the source of one of these FRB-flares was an elliptical galaxy located 6 billion light-years from the Milky Way, which led them to conclude that such bursts are born during the merger of neutron stars or other compact objects that turn into black hole. Subsequently, astrophysicists discovered that FRB flares are repeated, thereby calling these theories into question.
Astronomers participating in the Breakthrough Listen project, created two years ago to search for traces of extraterrestrial life by Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking, have confirmed that FRB 121102, discovered in the constellation Auriga by the Parks telescope about five years ago, does indeed emit repeated beams of radio waves, and found It has several new properties that make fast radio flares even more mysterious.
As the scientists note, one of the main features of these flares was believed to be that the peak of their emission occurs at approximately the same frequencies at which microwaves and wireless data transmission systems operate. It turned out that some FRB bursts have another higher frequency component that scientists had not noticed before.
Its discovery, according to the project participants, complicates the search for a "natural" explanation of how such outbreaks could occur. In addition, this problem is aggravated by the fact that all 15 flares discovered by Gayjar and his colleagues were recorded in just an hour of observation, which imposes even greater restrictions on their possible sources.
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However, scientists emphasize that this discovery is not unequivocal evidence of the artificial origin of these outbreaks, and participants in the Breakthrough Listen project plan to continue observing them in the hope of discovering other interesting and so far unknown properties. A complete analysis of the observations will soon be published in one of the peer-reviewed scientific journals.
