furbies in space--8/28/24

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Today's selection--from Things That Go Bump in the Universe by C. Renee James. In 2016, astronomers identified a “fast radio burst,” a Furby, that was repeating itself. They've since discovered others but have yet to identify the cause. One theory is that they come from collisions of neutron stars:

“In March 2016, … astronomers looking through archived data from the 305-meter Arecibo Radio Telescope noticed something unexpected about the fast radio burst labeled FRB 121102. It had been repeating itself. 

“Although there wasn’t an extensive catalog of fast radio bursts at this point, this behavior was definitely out of the ordinary. Emily Petroff and her colleagues had compiled the complete list of the 16 known events, along with every measurable or infernal property, and even had optimistically created a website to keep up with the new discoveries in relatively real time.

“‘There were more theories than bursts,’ Duncan Lorimer recalled. ‘I mean, there were lots of variations on themes, but not a week after the original paper came out in 2007, there was already something suggesting magnetars.’

“That made sense. Neutron stars were an easy scapegoat. Since the discovery of the pulsar, they had shown themselves to be perfectly capable of hosting all sorts of brief, violent events, but there were as yet no widely accepted models of a fast radio burst. However, astronomers generally agreed that if something billions of light-years away rapidly emitted that much power in radio waves, it was probably the last thing that object would ever do.

Lorimer Burst – observation of the first detected fast radio burst as described by Duncan Lorimer in 2006

“When FRB 121102 managed to survive the ordeal and blast out another round of radio waves (then another, and another), Cornell University’s Shami Chatterjee wrote that it ‘ruled out, in a single stroke, a wide range of explosive and cataclysmic theoretical models.’ What’s more, the ten encore performances allowed astronomers to zero in on its location, the first time a Furby’s home had ever been pinpointed. It was calling out to us from a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years away, a place where violence on this scale was completely unexpected.

As Sarah Burke-Spolaor would later succinctly state, ‘It was weird.’

“‘Weird’ is practically an invitation for further study, and just like that, the once maligned Furbies were suddenly all the rage. Artificial intelligence algorithms were now deployed to explore data sets on an unprecedented scale. Racing to the forefront of this data analysis frenzy was the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Research Center’s Breakthrough Listen initiative, a decades-long project of intelligent life beyond Earth.

“Created specifically to flag and categorize unusual radio signals, Breakthrough Listen’s AI sifted through 400 terabytes of data from the Green Bank Telescope alone to find out what else FRB 121102 might be doing. In the process, it turned up dozens of additional bursts, 21 of which occurred within the span of a single hour. Not only was the object not destroying itself, but it seemed positively gleeful in its energetic outbursts.

“Naturally, the public was hoping that these bursts were alien signals, especially now that SETI was involved. It didn’t help matters when a highly visible astronomer suggested that the bursts were somehow the signature of alien spaceships.

“Most astronomers, though, were betting otherwise.”

author:	C. Renee James
title:	Things That Go Bump in the Universe: How Astronomers Decode Cosmic Chaos
publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
pages:	195-197