Researchers have discovered repeating fast radio bursts (FRB) at the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) observatory. The object named FRB 180916.J0158+65 has been traced back to its place of origin, a nearby spiral galaxy containing a nebula. This finding was reported in a news briefing on Monday at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Crux of the Matter
FRB are explosions that produce as much energy as the sun does in nearly a century, in just a few thousandths of a second. They repeat their quick-pulsing radio tune in random bursts.
As per Kenzie Nimmo, a doctoral student at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, the big question had lied in what could possibly produce an FRB.
The bursts were eventually traced back to a dwarf galaxy with a high rate of star formation 3 billion light-years away, which contains a persistent radio source in the form of a nebula.
After the discovery at CHIME, Follow-up observations done by a network of telescopes in Europe allowed the research team to produce a high-resolution image of the FRB’s location. The results were published in the journal Nature.
Astronomers have also managed to determine how three non-repeating FRBs came from distant massive galaxies with little star formation going on. This in turn provided evidence that both repeating and non-repeating bursts arose from different types of environments.
Curiopedia
Spiral Galaxies form a class of galaxy originally described by Edwin Hubble in his 1936 work Most spiral galaxies consist of a flat, rotating disk containing stars, gas and dust, and a central concentration of stars known as the bulge. These are often surrounded by a much fainter halo of stars, many of which reside in globular clusters and are named as they are, due to their spiral structures that extend from the centre into the galactic disc. The spiral arms are sites of ongoing star formation and are brighter than the surrounding disc because of the young, hot OB stars that inhabit them. The Milky Way is a barred spiral, although the bar itself is difficult to observe from Earth’s current position within the galactic disc. The most convincing evidence for the stars forming a bar in the galactic centre comes from several recent surveys, including the Spitzer Space Telescope. More Info
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