Science
A Mysterious Rhythm Is Coming From Another Galaxy
Astronomers have been tracking fast radio bursts for years, but they’ve never caught one like this before.
Marina Koren
June 26, 2020
For about four days, the radio waves would arrive at random. Then, for the next 12, nothing.
Then, another four days of haphazard pulses. Followed by another 12 days of silence.
The pattern—the well-defined swings from frenzy to stillness and back again—persisted like clockwork for more than a year.
Dongzi Li, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, started tracking these signals in 2019. She works on a Canadian-led project, CHIME, that studies astrophysical phenomena called “fast radio bursts.†These invisible flashes, known as FRBs for short, reach Earth from all directions in space. They show up without warning and flash for a few milliseconds, matching the radiance of entire galaxies.
Astronomers don’t know what makes them, only that they can travel for millions, even billions, of years from their sources before reaching us. In the past decade, astronomers managed to detect about 100 of them before they vanished.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/06/fast-radio-burst-rhythm-pattern/613369/
