FRB 190520B was first discovered in 2019. FRBs are known as “radio bursts” with a length in milliseconds that glow brightly in radio light.
There are many questions raised around radio bursts. According to scientists, it could come from an explosive event in space, such as a neutron star – the “zombie” of massive stars – exploding or colliding, or a black hole colliding, or even signals from an extraterrestrial civilization.
The theory of a neutron star or a black hole is still considered the most likely, but if it were simply an explosion, the radio flash would have only occurred once. Indeed, most of the radio bursts that scientists have caught have happened this way before. But FRB 190520B is not like that.
The FRB 190520B is one of three radio transmitters that are being monitored in particular because of their inexplicably repetitive repetition. “Are the repeats different from the others?” – astrophysicist Kshitij Aggarwal from West Virginia University (USA) poses the problem.
Observations made by the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) observatory reveal a fascinating set of features.
The source of the signal has finally been revealed: the outskirts of a very old dwarf galaxy, nearly 4 billion light-years away.
Prior to this, dispersion measurements suggested that the source was 8 to 9.5 billion light-years away. However, independent measurements of the distance show that the galaxy is not that far away.
“This means that there is a lot of matter near the FRB that could confuse any attempt to use it to measure intergalactic gas,” said Dr. Aggarwal. On the other hand, this suggests that the source FRB-emitting continuous radio is located in a very complex plasma environment, consistent with the characteristics of a recent luminous supernova, which suggests that whatever the source, it was formed very closely. here – a “newborn” FRB source.
Astronomer Di Li from the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who led the study, said: “We continue to recognize that FRB 121102 (another repeat source studied) earlier) and FRB 190520B represents the early stages of a developing FRB population”.
The first signal from FRB 190520B reached Earth in May 2019, detected by the 500 m Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) in China and identified in November of that year by an inspection. FAST data.
The study has just been published in the scientific journal Nature.
