LONDON: Strange, fast radio bursts have been detected from spacesince 2007, and astronomers today are no closer to solving the mystery of their origin.
Highly energetic, these radio pulses seem to be coming from a distance of several billion light years.
Recently, researcher Michael Hippke at the Institute for Data Analysis in Germany, along with colleagues, studied 11 radio bursts that have occurred since 2007 and found they share a mathematical pattern.
The key to determining the distance the radio waves have traveled is their dispersion measures, which tells scientists how much dust, gas, and other material the waves have passed through on their way to Earth.
Those that have passed through a lot of material originated at greater distances than those that passed through very little.
Radio bursts can occur at a wide range of frequencies. Low-frequency waves are long and are often slowed down when interacting with matter, such as electron clouds.
In contrast, high-frequency waves are short and travel long distances relatively easily.
When a radio burst occurs, the high frequency waves arrive ahead of the lower frequency ones. The time delay between arrival of these waves is known as the dispersion measure.
Upon plotting the dispersion measures of the unusual radio bursts, Hippke and his team surprisingly found that these dispersion measures are all integer multiples of the number 187.5.
The chances of this pattern being coincidence are estimated to be five in 10,000.
One possible explanation is that the radio bursts are coming from the same direction rather than from everywhere in the universe.
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