Fast radio bursts from space have baffled scientists for years. But an explanation may come soon. - NBCNewsMACH
Because FRBs last only a thousandth of a second or so, any object producing them couldn’t be much bigger than 200 miles across — the distance radio waves can cover in that time. This suggests that the source is considerably smaller than an ordinary star: it might be a collapsed stellar corpse — the compact remains of a star that has exhausted its nuclear fuel — or possibly aWhile collisions might explain some of the FRBs, they don't make sense for the repeaters.
There are literally dozens of celestial objects that might be causing FRBs, ranging from prosaic things like souped-up supernovae — large stars that blow up at the ends of their lives — to weird things like magnetars — collapsed stellar corpses awash in strong magnetic fields. Some of the suggested explanations are truly far out and involve fracturing stellar crusts or exotic cracks in spacetime known as cosmic strings.
There are some who suggest that the FRBs might be alien signals, but that really doesn’t make sense. The sources are spread all over intergalactic space, and arranging cooperative alien behavior when even one-way communication takes many billions of years seems unlikely — to put it gently. Fact is, we simply don’t know what causes FRBs. But here’s my take: Almost every time astronomers turn up some unexpected new phenomenon in the sky, they’re baffled. Quasars and pulsars were deeply puzzling when first discovered. So researchers adopt a Sherlock Holmes approach and collect clues — which is to say, they find as many examples of the new phenomenon as they can. These observations became grist for the theoreticians — wonky types who like nothing better than to solve nature’s riddles.
Once there’s an abundance of data, the theoreticians can usually cook up the correct explanation pretty quickly. This isn’t always the case, of course. We still don’t know what
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