Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are one of the hottest topics in astronomy right now. These intense blasts of radio energy reach us from outside the galaxy, lasting only milliseconds before they disappear once more. Astronomers aren’t sure what causes them, and none of these bursts have ever repeated — except one, FRB 121102, which made headlines with the
identification of its host galaxy, sitting nearly 3 billion light-years away. The Breakthrough Listen project has just announced the detection of 15 additional bursts from FRB 121102, which has now been seen to repeat more than 150 times.
Fifteen new bursts may not seem unique among such a high number, but these bursts are different. They are the first time that FRB 121102 has been seen bursting at high frequencies; and they also signal, according to Vishal Gajjar of the University of California, Berkeley, a “newly active state.” On August 26, Gajjar was observing FRB 121102 using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia as part of
Breakthrough Listen and detected 15 new pulses over the course of five hours. The brightest burst occurred at about 7 GHz, a higher frequency than any pulse observed from an FRB before. Although the results have not yet been incorporated into a scientific article, some information is available in an
Astronomer’s Telegram.
The results come from a dataset 400 terabytes in size, covering frequencies from 4 to 8 GHz. “The high resolution of the data obtained by the Listen instrument will allow measurement of the properties of these mysterious bursts at a higher precision than ever possible before,” said Gajjar in a
press release. “The extraordinary capabilities of the [Breakthrough Listen] backend receiver, which is able to record several gigahertz of bandwidth at a time, split into billions of individual channels, enable a new view of the frequency spectrum of FRBs, and should shed additional light on the processes giving rise to FRB emission.”