Repeating
radio signals coming from a mystery source far beyond the Milky Way
have been discovered by scientists. While one-off fast radio bursts
(FRBs) have been detected in the past, this is the first time multiple
signals have been detected coming from the same place in space.
FRBs
are radio signals from deep space that last for just a few
milliseconds. Since their discovery over a decade ago, scientists have
been searching for more to try to understand their origin. At present,
there are several theories as to what they could be, with most involving
some cataclysmic event like a supernova or a neutron star collapsing
into a black hole.
All
of the events seen so far appear to have been one-offs, with subsequent
observations failing to find follow-up bursts coming from the same
position as the original. However, an international team of researchers
has now discovered an additional 10 bursts coming from the same
direction as FRB 121102, using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto
Rico.
Publishing their findings in the journal Nature,
the researchers report the subsequent bursts have the same dispersion
measures and sky positions as the original FRB. This, they say, means
the source must have survived whatever event caused the FRB to be
produced in the first place – i.e. it cannot have been a cataclysmic
one-off event. They also found the bursts differed in brightness from
other FRBs, suggesting a different source.
Paul Scholz, from
McGill University, was the first person to notice the repeating burst:
"I knew immediately that the discovery would be extremely important in
the study of FRBs."
Arecibo telescopeDanielle FutselaarIn
the study, researchers suggest the repeating bursts are coming from a
very young neutron star. "Although there may be multiple physical
origins for the population of fast radio bursts, these repeat bursts
with high dispersion measure and variable spectra specifically seen from
the direction of FRB 121102 support an origin in a young, highly
magnetised, extragalactic neutron star," they wrote.
The team now
hopes to identify the galaxy from which the repeating FRBs came from.
"Once we have precisely localised the repeater's position on the sky, we
will be able to compare observations from optical and X-ray telescopes
and see if there is a galaxy there," said Jason Hessels, corresponding
author on the study. "Finding the host galaxy of this source is critical
to understanding its properties."
Their study follows another paper on FRBs published earlier this month. Also appearing in Nature, researchers announced the discovery of the location and host galaxy of another FRB first discovered in April last year.
They
found FRB 150418 had emanated from an elliptical galaxy six billion
light years away. Unlike FRB 121102, this burst did not repeat, leading
scientists to say it was probably produced by merger event, where two
stars that are orbiting each other come together. In the paper, the team
also said they believe there are at least two different sources of
FRBs.
ALSO: Check out my latest action novel, "The Shaitan!" https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/573076
Hello
my fellow poets, artists and poet aficionados!
I, Daniel Canada aka Obsidian, am making a departure from my usual
poetry newsletters to inform you that I have finally published my supernatural thriller,
fiction novel, entitled: The Shaitan.
To be sure, this undertaking took close to 10 years and was accomplished during
my homeless poet days, while I was busy on the poetry circuit and co-hosting “The Time Square Shout Out!” along with “The Shout Out @ Ottos!,” with my
sidekick, Hobobob.
I invite you all to purchase a copy and check it
out! What is more, I welcome your comments, criticisms and insights and would
love to get feedback from you, my fellow wordsmiths!
Presently, The
Shaitan (written under my nom de plume, Ashur
Etil Alani) is being sold online at Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, Epub,
Mobi (Kindle), Irf, Pdb for Palm and Kobo Ebooks sites, for $3.99 a copy. (It
should also be found on Nook, & will be sold as an ebook on Amazon.com at a
later date. For more information and updates you can follow me on my new blog
site: www.Ashuretilalani@blogspot.com
https://www.smashwords.com/(Click off the “Adult filter” button on
the top right of page before searching for book title The Shaitan in “search” field)
Yours truly,
Obsidian aka
Ashur Etil Alani
Here’s
a quick synopsis of the book!
The
Shaitan is a saga about Staff Sergeant Hank Donaldson, who
is a member of the elite 75th Regiment of the United States Army Rangers and a
decorated veteran of the recent Gulf Wars.Staff Sergeant Donaldson is also an unwitting candidate in a secret
government psychic-warfare program, wherein he is unsuspectingly pitted against
the world's most wanted terrorist, Ismial Abdur Rahim.
Staff Sergeant Donaldson is on the prowl, chasing
Ismial, who goes by the code name The
Shaitan, through the most unlikely places, the poetry community of the
Lower East and West Sides of Manhattan. His pursuit will take him through all
the spoken word haunts of the artist communities, in an effort to catch Ismial
and eliminate him before he can launch a terrorist attack in the heart of New
York City.
The
Shaitan is a fast moving narrative of one man's herculean
struggle against unseen forces, within and without, taking you from the teaming
alleyways of the Holy Land in Jerusalem and Yemen, to the bustling streets of
New York City, and through a labyrinth of deceit in the poetry community in the
Lower East and West Sides of Manhattan, all the way to its shocking finale.
Remains of the lost continent of Lumeria (also known as "Mu"). Which was
reportedly destroyed in the biblical Flood of Noah. Anyway check it
out! -Daniel aka Obsidian
As the ice thaws, more will be revealed. -Daniel aka Obsidian
Deep beneath Antarctica's ice, signs of bizarre cosmic
particles
An observatory on the southern continent has detected
high-energy neutrinos, some of which come from beyond our galaxy.
By Jesse Emspak, LiveScience August 23, 2015
Buried deep in the Antarctic ice, an observatory has spotted
ghostly, nearly massless particles coming from inside our galaxy and points
beyond the Milky Way.
Finding these cosmic neutrinos not only confirms their
existence but also sheds light on the origins of cosmic rays, the researchers
said.
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is made up of 86 shafts dug
8,000 feet into the ice near the South Pole. The shafts are equipped with
detectors that look for the telltale light from high-energy particles plowing
through the surrounding ice. [See Photos of the IceCube Observatory Buried in
Ice]
Recommended: Are you scientifically literate? Take our quiz
Neutrinos have little mass, and zip through matter so easily
that a block of lead a light-year across wouldn't stop them. These elusive
particles come from high-energy sources: exploding stars, black holes and
galactic cores among them.
Though they don't interact much with matter, occasionally
one will hit an atomic nucleus on Earth. When that happens the neutrino
generates a particle called a muon. That's what scientists look for when
seeking neutrinos — the muons move faster than the speed of light in a solid
(ice in this case) and generate light waves, like the wake of a boat in water,
called Cherenkov radiation. They also show the paths of the neutrinos. (The
speed of light is constant in a vacuum, but it is slower in a medium like ice
or glass — this is what causes refraction. So the muons aren't actually
breaking the speed of light limit).
The IceCube project found neutrinos from outside our galaxy
in 2013, but to confirm that detection the researchers, led by a team at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, had to make sure these neutrinos weren't
coming from sources within our own galaxy (such as from the sun). To do so,
they looked for neutrinos with similar energies that were coming from all
directions at the same rate, meaning they are independent of the Earth's
rotation and orbit around the sun — the only way that can happen is if the
source is outside the galaxy.
The scientists also had to filter out muons created when
cosmic rays crash into the planet's atmosphere. They used the Earth itself to
weed out most of these muons, pointing the observatory through the Earth and
toward the sky in the Northern Hemisphere (which is "down" with
respect to Antarctica).
Over two years, between May 2010 and May 2012, the
observatory logged more than 35,000 neutrinos, with 20 of those showing high
enough energies to suggest they came from cosmic sources.
Those 20 neutrinos, called muon neutrinos, came from the
opposite direction, but at approximately the same rate, as similar neutrinos
observed in earlier runs. Since the rate at which they showed up was about the
same throughout the observation, it means it didn't matter where the
observatory was pointed as a result of the daily rotation and yearly orbit of
the Earth — the result predicted for extragalactic neutrinos. [Wacky Physics:
The Coolest Little Particles in Nature]
"At least a fraction of that flux is extragalactic
origin," Albrecht Karle, a UW-Madison professor of physics and one of the
senior authors of the new study, told Live Science. "This was a new
discovery."
Those observations also told them something else: The
energies of the muon neutrinos, and their numbers, didn't fit well with several
models of their origins. The scientists don't address it deeply in their study
("We leave that to theorists," Karle said), but the data appear to
show these muon neutrinos are probably not coming from gamma-ray bursts (GRBs),
which are highly energetic events in space.
"There are some stringent upper limits of neutrinos
from GRBs — we know they don't produce that many," he said.
Similarly, active galactic nuclei don't seem to be the
culprit, either, though Karle said it's too soon to say for sure.
Other possibilities are galaxies going through bouts of
rapid star formation, or masses of gas and dust that surround black holes at
the galactic centers. As atoms get pulled into the maw of a black hole, they
slam into each other more often at higher energies. Eventually some produce
pions, neutrinos and photons. If that were the case, Karle said, then one would
expect a nearly one-to-one ratio of high-energy neutrinos to accompanying
photons. But that hasn't been confirmed or refuted yet.
