Oldest fast radio burst ever seen sheds light on early star formation

 

Image courtesy of Science Photo Library/Alamys

Joel Kontinen

Radio bursts are a phenomenon that surprise us. We don’t know the cause.

A bright flash of radio waves from 3 billion years after the big bang is illuminating parts of the universe that astronomers can’t normally see. Magnetars, which are a kind of neutron star, may be the source of fast radio bursts.

A strange flash of light from near the beginning of the universe could help astronomers map difficult-to-see gas in between galaxies, like a flashbulb in a dark room.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are extremely short but powerful blasts of radio-frequency light that have puzzled astronomers since they were first spotted in 2007. A leading theory is that they are produced by extremely magnetic neutron stars, called magnetars. But because we only know of a few thousand examples in the whole universe, with most coming from galaxies that are relatively close to the Milky Way, there is much we still don’t understand about them.

Source:

Alex Wilkins 2025 Oldest fast radio burst ever seen sheds light on early star formation | New Scientist 15 August 

 

Radio bursts from space are exhibiting a strange ‘sad trombone’ effect

 

Image courtesy of Seth Shostak/SETI Institute

Joel Kontinen 

Astronomers have spotted a set of 35 mysterious flashes of radio waves from space that seem to show a strange phenomenon of decreasing frequency that has never been seen before.

"Short, powerful bursts of radio waves from space are getting stranger and stranger. Astronomers have spotted 35 of these bursts from a single object with a pattern unlike any we have seen before."

Sofia Sheikh at the SETI Institute in California and her colleagues observed this object, a fast radio burst (FRB) called FRB 20220912A, over the course of 541 hours of observation with the Allen Telescope Array in California. In each of the bursts from this FRB, they found a phenomenon called the “sad trombone”.

Source:

Leah Crane 2023. Radio bursts from space are exhibiting a strange ‘sad trombone’ effect | New Scientist. 28 December.