At 3 billion light-years away, the mysterious source FRB 121102 "woke up" again: telescopes observed a series of fast radio bursts of unknown nature.
Sensitive radio telescopes that track the Universe day and night sometimes register fast bursts of radiation - single pulses, short, but carrying enormous energy. Fast radio bursts (FRB) were first observed in 2007, but they have not yet received a recognized explanation. Their source is also unknown: it can be located in our Galaxy, and beyond it, and even on Earth, being created by technical devices.
It is difficult to study that FRBs are too short-lived and unpredictable, so so far only about 25 such events have been noticed. The only fast radio burst, FRB 121102, recorded in 2012, and then in 2015 and 2016, was observed again. All this attracted special attention to FRB 121102 and allowed us to give several versions of its source: the active core of a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light years away, or a binary system of a neutron star and supernova remnants.
The FRB is also being monitored by astronomers working on the Breakthrough Listen project and using a range of large radio telescopes, including the 100-meter Green Bank, the world's largest telescope with a rotating parabolic antenna. The main goal of the project is to search for extraterrestrial life, but recently Breakthrough Listen scientists managed to register a series of 15 new flares of FRB 121102 at once, each lasting about 300 microseconds. This was reported by the press service of the University of California at Berkeley.
14 out of 15 fast radio bursts from source 121102 / Breakthrough Listen / Green Bank Telescope / Berkeley University
The strange thing was that the frequency of the bursts was about twice as high as the previous pulses of FRB 121102. Perhaps this will facilitate the observation of the next flares of 121102 and help, finally, to solve the riddle of fast radio bursts.
Sergey Vasiliev