Rarely sighted and unusually bright, keep throwing out that can't be , sending astrophysicists in as they search for their sources. Some blip more than once, drawing researchers back for repeat investigations. Most are never heard from again.
A new look at those one-hit-wonders is prompting astrophysicists to once again rethink what they are and where they originate from. The new tranche of data comes from the (CHIME), a radio telescope that surveys large swathes of the sky rather than restricting its focus on small patches near previously detected fast radio bursts (FRBs). In 2020, CHIME the first known to repeat in a distinct and repeatable fashion, .
Today, just 3 percent of known FRBs emit flashes more than once, with most emitting energetic flashes in unpredictable, erratic patterns. The vast majority of the more than 1,000 FRBs cataloged so far are non-repeaters: solitary blasts of radio waves mere milliseconds in duration, that are as powerful as hundreds of millions of Suns. Finding differences between these two types of blast could point to a mutual origin story.
"This was the first look at the other 97 percent," Ayush Pandhi, an astrophysics graduate student at the University of Toronto who led the new study. Pandhi and colleagues looked at the burst profiles of FRBs, specifically the orientations of the waves in what is referred to as their . Of the 128 non-repeating FRBs studied, 118 had polarization information collected.
Of those, 89 met the criteria for being c.