I will come to what I have to say a bit further on but I thought two items were of interest. The first from Yahoo! News -both are by Andrew Griffin but Yahoo! puts its usual editing skills to work.
Radio blasts with 'regular rhythms' and unknown origin coming from space, scientists say
Researchers have picked up strange, repeating rhythms in blasts of energy coming from an unknown source in space.
The blasts are known as fast radio bursts, or FRBs, and are coming to Earth in a stable, repeating pattern, according to a new paper detailing the discovery.
Researchers still do not know the source of those bursts. Though they must come from some very extreme, intense part of the universe, there is no way of knowing what process gives rise to them.
The first FRB was picked up in 2007 and scientists have gone on to find more than 100 since. Initially, they were detected only as individual blasts, but in recent times researchers have found repeating sources.
Now astronomers have started to find bursts repeating in a pattern, where they seem to switch off and on in a predictable pattern.
The latest discovery sends out random bursts of radio waves over a four-day window, and then goes quiet for 12 days, before beginning again.
Researchers watched the bursts for more than 500 days, noting that the 16-day pattern occurred consistently over that time, making it the most definitive pattern yet seen.
“This FRB we’re reporting now is like clockwork,” says Kiyoshi Masui, assistant professor of physics in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
“It’s the most definitive pattern we’ve seen from one of these sources. And it’s a big clue that we can use to start hunting down the physics of what’s causing these bright flashes, which nobody really understands.”
The discovery is reported in a new article, titled 'Periodic activity from a fast radio burst source', published in Nature today.
The latest FRBs were picked up by CHIME, a radio telescope in British Columbia that began its work in 2017. Since then, it quickly started picking up FRBs, using a technique that allows it to stare at the entire sky rather than moving around if and when any burst is detected.
The repeating nature of the burst could give new insight into where they are coming from.
Possibilities include one single object such as a neutron star that is spinning and wobbling in space. That could explain the pattern to the blasts, since the 16-day period may be the time it takes for the object to spin around, with the four days of activity the ones in which it is pointing towards us.
The blasts could also be the result of a binary system such as a neutron star orbiting around another neutron star or black hole. The pattern could be the result of the orbit between , and the interaction between the two objects, which would explain their regular pattern, scientists say.
Another involves a static radio source that is going around a central star – that star could be letting out a cloud of gas that magnify the radio emissions and send them powerfully towards Earth. The repeating pattern could therefore be an indication of when that source travels through its clouds.
The CHIME telescope works to keep exploring FRB, measuring one roughly each day. It will also keep watching the newly discovered burst, and any changes in its properties could offer an important hint about where it is coming from.
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The second comes from the Independent online:
SCIENTISTS FIND EXACT LOCATION OF INTENSE RADIO BLASTS COMING FROM SPACE
Scientists have tracked down the location of intense radio signals that have been coming from space.
Researchers found that the blasts appear to be coming from galaxies that look remarkably similar to our own Milky Way.
The discovery rules out some of the most extreme explanations for where the blasts are coming from, such as supermassive black holes. But the source of the bursts – which are so unusual they have been explained by everything from stars slamming together to alien technology – still remains mysterious.
Fast radio bursts are very short, very intense blasts of energy that come to us from deep in space. They last just a milisecond but release more energy than our Sun emits in 80 years.
They were first discovered in 2007, and scientists have spent the years since attempting to understand how something can give such bright but brief signals. But spotting them is difficult, since there is no way to predict where one may come from, and understanding their origin is even harder.
Now researchers have made a new breakthrough by looking at the precise location of four previously discovered fast radio bursts. Using the ASKAP radio telescope located in the Western Australian outback, astronomers were able to "zoom in" onto the host galaxies of the burst, in an attempt to understand whether their neighbourhoods could give any clue about where they are coming from.
They found that all four of the bursts they studied appeared to come from massive galaxies that are forming new stars at a modest rate, like the Milky Way.
While the process creating them still remains clear, the fact they are being ejected from the edges of their home galaxies does rule out some explanations of where they could be coming from.
“These precisely localised fast radio bursts came from the outskirts of their home galaxies, removing the possibility that they have anything to do with supermassive black holes,” said Shivani Bhandari, a researcher at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, who led the research which is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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We see the headline in one piece that the origin of FRBs is...Unknown. In the original article from the Independent, however, we read that the source of the FRBs has led scientists to their exact location source.
Neither is really true since "scientists" have only managed to find the area in space where the FRBs originate.
It has to be remembered that space itself is not 'noiseless'. In fact, it is quite noisy if you listen in. We also, despite the outrageous claims of a large number of astronomers, do not know everything about the universe and have all the answers -we have not even explored the planets or moons in our own system yet and they are throwing up a large number of mysteries.
For instance:
Astronomers Detect Glowing Green Oxygen Aura in Mars’ Atmosphere
It has long been believed that our world is the only planet in the Solar System with an oxygen-based atmosphere, as there is a glowing green aura around the Earth formed by the combination of sunlight with oxygen atoms and atmospheric molecules. Similar emissions have now for the first time been spotted surrounding the Red Planet.
The European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), circling the planet since 2016, has detected a glowing green oxygen aura in the Martian atmosphere for the first time, the agency said in a Monday statement.
The emission ring, seen previously only around the Earth by astronauts aboard the International Space Station, occurs when sunlight combines with oxygen atoms and air molecules in the planet’s atmosphere.
Astronomers have for decades posited that a similar emission signature takes place in Mars’ atmosphere, but only now have they proved its presence.
“One of the brightest emissions seen on Earth stems from night glow. More specifically, from oxygen atoms emitting a particular wavelength of light that has never been seen around another planet,” said Jean-Claude Gerard of the Belgian University of Liege, and lead author of the new study published in Nature Astronomy. “However, this emission has been predicted to exist at Mars for around 40 years – and, thanks to TGO, we’ve found it”.
The glowing green oxygen aura was spotted by a special TGO tool known as NOMAD (Nadir and Occultation for Mars Discovery), as the orbiter circled the Red Planet in the period between April and December of 2019, according to the research team.
“Previous observations hadn’t captured any kind of green glow at Mars, so we decided to reorient the UVIS nadir channel to point at the ‘edge’ of Mars, similar to the perspective you see in images of Earth taken from the ISS,” said Ann Carine Vandaele of the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy, co-author of the study and principal investigator for NOMAD.
The team asserts that further study is needed to uncover additional secrets of the Martian atmosphere, and necessarily suggest sending more satellites to Mars to expand our knowledge of our nearest planetary neighbor.
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