New pattern uncovered in mysterious 'fast radio bursts' from deep space

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What's creating these unusual signals? And why does this one repeat itself?

A photo shows the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment Fast Radio Burst Project at night.
A photo shows the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment Fast Radio Burst Project at night. (Image credit: CHIME FRB)

One of the universe's deep mysteries just got a lot stranger. Astrophysicists have discovered a clue that could help explain why, every once in a while, superfast bursts of radio waves flash across Earth from deep space. But the clue — a repeating 16-day pattern in one of the bursts, undermines one of the most popular theories for where the bursts are coming from.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) have likely happened for billions of years. But humans only discovered them in 2007, and have detected only a few dozen of them since. And in June 2019, astronomers finally tracked an FRB to its home galaxy. 

But no one knows what causes them. Because these bursts are so rare, unusual and bright — considering that they're visible from billions of light-years across space — physicists have tended to assume they come from a cataclysmic event, such as the collision of stars.

This repeating pattern, however, suggests that something else is going on, that there's some sort of natural machine in the universe for pumping regular shrieks of radio energy across space.

Related: Stephen Hawking's most far-out ideas about black holes

Researchers looking at data from the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment Fast Radio Burst Project (CHIME/FRB) first spotted this FRB, known as FRB 180916.J0158+65, in 2019. In January 2020, they published a paper in the journal Nature that reanalyzed old data and found more than one burst from FRB 180916.J0158+65. They traced this FRB back to a relatively nearby spiral galaxy. What's new in this latest paper, published Feb. 3 to the arXiv database, is the regular pattern in the bursts. The FRB, they found, goes through four-day cycles of regular activity, bleating out radio waves into space on an almost hourly basis. Then it goes into a 12-day period of silence. Sometimes the source seems to skip its usual four-day awake periods, or lets out only a single burst. CHIME/FRB is able to watch the FRB only some of the time, they noted, so it's likely the detector misses many FRBs during the awake period.

No one knows what this pattern means, the researchers noted in a statement, but this pattern doesn't fit neatly into any existing explanations for FRBs.

In other words, for astrophysics, patterns tend to indicate rotation. But no one knows if this pattern governs all FRBs or just some of them. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Rafi Letzter
Rafi Letzter
Staff Writer
Rafi joined Live Science in 2017. He has a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of journalism. You can find his past science reporting at Inverse, Business Insider and Popular Science, and his past photojournalism on the Flash90 wire service and in the pages of The Courier Post of southern New Jersey.