An immediately apparent interesting thing about FRB190520 was that it is one of the only 24 repeating FRBs and repeats much more frequently than others – producing 75 bursts over a span of six months in 2020. We found it using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope in China. The new FRB my colleagues and I discovered is named FRB190520. The more stretched out an FRB is, the more plasma the signal must have passed through, the farther away the source must be. This allows researchers to use dispersion to estimate how far from Earth an FRB originated. FRBs contain a range of frequencies, so the higher frequency light in the burst hits Earth before the lower frequencies, causing the dispersion. The plasma that lies between stars and galaxies causes all light – including radio waves – to slow down, but lower frequencies feel this effect more strongly and slow down more than higher frequencies. Dispersion is basically a measure of how stretched out an FRB is when it reaches Earth. When a telescope captures an FRB, one of the most important features researchers look at is something called dispersion. In the past 15 years, astronomers have detected around 800 FRBs, with more being discovered every day. Researchers here at West Virginia University detected the first FRB back in 2007. They release as much energy in a millisecond as the Sun does over many days. A newly discovered fast radio burst has some unique properties that are simultaneously giving astronomers important clues into what may cause these mysterious astronomical phenomena while also calling into question one of the few things scientists thought they knew about these powerful flares, as my colleagues and I describe in a new study in Nature on June 8, 2022.įast radio bursts, or FRBs, are extremely bright pulses of radio waves that come from faraway galaxies.
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