An international research team reports on the discovery of a new fast radio burst (FRB) and its efforts to locate the source of the outbreak.
FRB events have become the focus of astronomers' attention only relatively recently. They are extremely short but powerful flares in the radio frequency range that occur somewhere in space, but scientists still have not been able to find the sources of these flares. This new FRB event, now called FRB 150215, was first detected by researchers working with the Parks Telescope in New South Wales, Australia. The uniqueness of the detection of this FRB lies in the fact that immediately after the first information about it appeared, several scientific groups directed their telescopes to the place in the sky where the flash appeared. Unfortunately, none of these teams were able to either discover what could be the cause of this outbreak, or indicate exactly the coordinates of this outbreak in the sky. In addition, after analyzing the data,Collected with these few telescopes, the researchers found that this FRB has made an interesting journey through our Milky Way galaxy. Therefore, without learning almost anything about this new FRB, the researchers were able to gain new information about our Galaxy.
The discovery of FRB 150215 is the 22nd discovery of FRBs for which the source remains unknown, making them the greatest mystery of modern astronomy. The mysterious nature of these objects gives rise to many theories regarding their origin, ranging from supernovae to hypotheses about signals given by representatives of extraterrestrial civilizations.
The study appeared on the arxiv.org advanced scientific publications server; lead author Emily Petroff.