Fast Radio Bursts may flash with some rhyme and reason.
Now Rajwade and his collaborators have detected a second possible pattern, this time in the original 2012 repeater. They detailed their findings in May in theThe team devoted as much time as they could get on the Lovell Telescope in the UK to staring at the original repeater, which amounted to about 120 hours scattered sporadically over four years.
But the finding remains unconfirmed for now. Due to telescope maintenance and fierce competition for observing time, the group’s 120 hours of observing happened to fall largely during periods when they now understand the repeater to have been “switched on,” possibly throwing off their results. They’ll need regularly spaced follow-up observations to see if the source truly keeps to their inferred timetable.
Other FRB researchers share her enthusiasm for the work ahead. “It’s really exciting stuff and it’s good for the global community to push forward on this,” says, an astronomer at McGill University and member of the CHIME collaboration. “These sorts of discoveries really restrict things to the point where we might someday have a solid picture for what these things are.”
The new pattern more strongly supports theories depicting separated objects periodically messing with each other from afar. “My guess would be an orbital system,” Rajwade says. “The FRB is actually coming from a compact object like a neutron star, but it could be orbiting pretty much anything: a massive star, a black hole, right now everything is on the table.” FRBs may also have various origins.
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