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An alien signal repeats at the rate astronomers predicted

In june this year, researchers at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Macclesfield, United Kingdom, detected the signal FRB 121102 repeating itself in a period that lasted a total of 157 days: with 90 days of activity and 67 of silence. Now, after little more than two months, other telescopes detected new radio bursts coming from the same direction, just at the time it had been estimated that they would return.

FRB 121102.

The green circle marks where the FRB 121102 signal comes from. Credit: Rogelio Bernal Andreo

Currently, several teams of researchers are competing to predict with the greatest accuracy the resurgence cycle of this signal originating 3 billion light years away, in a dwarf galaxy. Among them a team from the China National Observatory that, thanks to the FAST telescope, detected at least 12 bursts of varying intensity coming from the direction of FRB 121102 between July 29 and August 17.

Chinese scientists established a cycle of 156 Earth days and expect the next “shutdown” to occur between August 31 and September 9. “If the source is still on after these dates, it would mean that the estimated period of the source is not real or has an evolution”, they affirmed.

Another group of scholars led by Marilyn Cruces of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (Germany) differs from this full-cycle estimate by just one day. According to her calculations, this would last 157 days, of which the source FRB 121102 would be active 90 days and another 67 inactive. In her forecast, the current phase of flares would last until next October 14, then the source would hibernate for 67 days and return to broadcast between December 17, 2020 and March 24, 2021.

Jodrell Bank Observatory, UK

This class of intense radio wave emissions can release as much energy as hundreds of millions of suns in a matter of milliseconds, but most of the bursts observed have exploded only once, then disappear without a trace of their intensity. This makes it very difficult to determine the nature of these signals and monitor their behavior.

Only a few sources of fast bursts have repeated their emissions during observations, and scientists hope this small sample will allow them to unravel the puzzle of the entire phenomenon.

Dr Kaustubh Rajwade from the University of Manchester, who led the research last June, said:

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‘This is an exciting result. In fact, this is only the second system where we think we’ve seen this modulation in burst activity. Detecting a periodicity provides a limitation to the origin of radio bursts: for example, the activity cycles could be an argument against a precessing neutron star as a source.

Source: ScienceAlert/Yahoo!

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