Surprising new features of mysterious fast radio bursts defy current understanding

Fast radio bursts – a puzzling and profound mystery

An international team of scientists reveals an evolving, magnetized environment and a surprising source location for fast radio bursts in space – observations that defy current understanding.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-long cosmic explosions, each producing the energy equivalent to the Sun’s annual output. Their amazing nature continues to amaze scientists more than 15 years after the first discovery of electromagnetic radio wave pulses in space. Now, newly released research only deepens the mystery that surrounds it.

Unexpected new observations from a series of cosmic radio bursts by an international team of scientists challenge prevailing understandings of the physical nature and central engine of FRBs. The researchers, which include astrophysicist Bing Zhang of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), published their findings in the September 21 issue of the journal Nature.

The FRB cosmic observations were made in late spring 2021 using the massive Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) in China. The team detected 1,863 bursts in 82 hours over 54 days from an active fast radio burst source called FRB 20201124A. The scientists were led along with Zhang by Heng Xu, Kejia Lee, Subo Dong of Peking University and Weiwei Zhu of the National Astronomical Observatories of China.

“This is the largest sample of FRB data with polarization information from a single source,” Lee said.

Recent observations of a quick radio burst from ours

” data-gt-translate-attributes=”[{” attribute=””>Milky Way galaxy indicate that it originated from a magnetar, which is a dense, city-sized neutron star with an incredibly powerful magnetic field. On the other hand, the origin of very distant cosmological fast radio bursts remains unknown. And these latest observations leave scientists questioning what they thought they knew about them.

“These observations brought us back to the drawing board,” said Zhang, who also serves as founding director of UNLV’s Nevada Center for Astrophysics. “It is clear that FRBs are more mysterious than what we have imagined. More multi-wavelength observational campaigns are needed to further unveil the nature of these objects.”

The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), nicknamed Tianyan (“Eye of the Sky/Heaven”) is a radio telescope located in the Dawodang depression, a natural basin in Pingtang County, Guizhou, southwest China. It consists of a fixed 500-meter diameter dish constructed in a natural depression in the landscape. It is the world’s largest filled-aperture radio telescope, and the second-largest single-dish aperture after the sparsely-filled RATAN-600 in Russia.

What makes the latest observations surprising to scientists is the irregular, short-time variations of the so-called “Faraday rotation measure,” essentially the strength of the magnetic field and density of particles in the vicinity of the FRB source. The variations went up and down during the first 36 days of observation and suddenly stopped during the last 18 days before the source quenched.

“I equate it to filming a movie of the surroundings of an FRB source, and our film revealed a complex, dynamically evolving, magnetized environment that was never imagined before,” said Zhang. “Such an environment is not straightforwardly expected for an isolated magnetar. Something else might be in the vicinity of the FRB engine, possibly a binary companion,” added Zhang.

To observe the host galaxy of the FRB, the team of astronomers also made use of the 10-m Keck telescopes located at Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Zhang says that young magnetars are believed to reside in active star-forming regions of a star-forming galaxy, but the optical image of the host galaxy shows that – unexpectedly – it’s a metal-rich barred spiral galaxy like our Milky Way. The FRB location is in a region where there is no significant star-forming activity.

“This location is inconsistent with a young magnetar central engine formed during an extreme explosion such as a long gamma-ray burst or a superluminous supernova, widely speculated progenitors of active FRB engines,” said Dong.

Reference: “A fast radio burst source at a complex magnetized site in a barred galaxy” by H. Xu, J. R. Niu, P. Chen, K. J. Lee, W. W. Zhu, S. Dong, B. Zhang, J. C. Jiang, B. J. Wang, J. W. Xu, C. F. Zhang, H. Fu, A. V. Filippenko, E. W. Peng, D. J. Zhou, Y. K. Zhang, P. Wang, Y. Feng, Y. Li, T. G. Brink, D. Z. Li, W. Lu, Y. P. Yang, R. N. Caballero, C. Cai, M. Z. Chen, Z. G. Dai, S. G. Djorgovski, A. Esamdin, H. Q. Gan, P. Guhathakurta, J. L. Han, L. F. Hao, Y. X. Huang, P. Jiang, C. K. Li, D. Li, H. Li, X. Q. Li, Z. X. Li, Z. Y. Liu, R. Luo, Y. P. Men, C. H. Niu, W. X. Peng, L. Qian, L. M. Song, D. Stern, A. Stockton, J. H. Sun, F. Y. Wang, M. Wang, N. Wang, W. Y. Wang, X. F. Wu, S. Xiao, S. L. Xiong, Y. H. Xu, R. X. Xu, J. Yang, X. Yang, R. Yao, Q. B. Yi, Y. L. Yue, D. J. Yu, W. F. Yu, J. P. Yuan, B. B. Zhang, S. B. Zhang, S. N. Zhang, Y. Zhao, W. K. Zheng, Y. Zhu and J. H. Zou, 21 September 2022, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05071-8

The study appeared September 21 in the journal Nature and includes 74 co-authors from 30 institutions. In addition to UNLV, Peking University, and the National Astronomical Observatories of China, collaborating institutions also include Purple Mountain Observatory, Yunnan University, UC Berkeley, Caltech,