A Mysterious Radio Wave Coil Passing through Space

In 2001, West Virginia Univ. undergraduate student David Narkevic was poring through stellar data collected by the Parkes radio dish in Australia. What Narkevic stumbled upon would leave astronomers scratching their heads for years following. A powerful radio burst, estimated at originating some 1.6 billion light-years away, was picked up. According to New Scientist, the burst released energy akin to what the sun produces in a month in a manner of milliseconds.

Since then, scientists have detected 16 Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs).

Now, an international team of scientists have linked FRBs with a highly magnetized, gas-filled region of space.

“We now know that the energy from this particular burst passed through a dense magnetized field shortly after it formed,” said Univ. of British Columbia astronomer Kiyoshi Masui, the lead author of the study published in Nature.

FRBs “are bright, unresolved, non-repeating, broadband millisecond flashes, found primarily at high Galactic latitudes, with dispersion measures much larger than expected for a Galactic source,” the researchers write.

Scientists believe possibly thousands occur every day without being detected. The team focused their study on a burst called FRB 110523, which originated no more than 6 billion light-years from Earth.

To spot the burst, the team used data mining software developed by Masui and Jonathan Sievers, of the Univ. of KwaZulu-Natal. Hsiu-Hsien Line, of Carnegie Mellon Univ., led the search through the data, which originated from radio astronomy observations.

“Hidden within an incredibly massive data set, we found a very peculiar signal that matched all known characterizes of a (FRB), but with a tantalizing extra element that we simply have never seen before,” said Carnegie Mellon’s Jeffrey Peterson.

The team discovered the FRB was shaped like a coil, which is known as a Faraday rotation and occurs when a radio wave passes through a powerful magnetic field. Additionally, the burst traveled through two regions of ionized gas known as screens—the strongest near the burst’s source. According to the Univ. of British Columbia, “Only two things could leave such an imprint on the signal: a nebula surrounding the source or a galactic center.”

The scientists will continue to use their new software to find other FRBs in hope of learning more about their nature.