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Caltech Graduate Student Helps Determine Source of Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts

Published on Wednesday, November 4, 2020 | 2:15 pm
 
Caltech graduate student Chris Bochenek is pictured at a STARE2 receiver at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in Goldstone in an undated photo illustration provided by Caltech.

New research led by a Caltech graduate student and published Wednesday has linked the previously-unknown source of strange blasts of radio waves from deep space to a type of dead star known as a magnetar.

The so-called Fast Radio Bursts have puzzled scientists since their discovery in 2007. Proposed explanations ranged from natural phenomena, including magnetars, to signals sent by intelligent alien civilizations.

In a paper published Wednesday in Nature by a team from Caltech, “researchers demonstrate that the answer to the decade-long riddle likely involves a type of dead magnetic star called a magnetar,” the institution said in a written statement.

The study focused on data collected from an FRB first detected on April 28 by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment also known as CHIME. However, the Canadian facility caught only a glimpse of the event in its “peripheral vision,” according to the statement. But Caltech graduate student Christopher Bochenek reviewed data from the antenna array Caltech operates out of Goldstone, California in partnership with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, called the Survey for Transient Astronomical Radio Emission 2, or STARE2, he found some exciting results.

“When I saw the data, I was basically paralyzed,” according to Bochenek, who was the lead author of the study, working alongside colleagues, including Caltech Astronomy Professor Vikram Ravi.

“At the radio frequencies we observe with STARE2, the signal was much stronger than what CHIME reported. We had caught the FRB head-on,” he said.

It was also the first time an FRB was detected emanating from within our own Milky Way galaxy, as previous FRBs had been traced to other galaxies.

The event recorded by STARE2 represented the most energetic burst of radio waves ever recorded from our galaxy, “shooting out as much energy as the sun produces in about 30 seconds, assuming the magnetar’s estimated distance of about 30,000 light-years,” according to the Caltech statement. “With these latest findings, astronomers have finally caught a magnetar red-handed, as it shot out an intense radio blast in our own cosmic backyard.”

The STARE 2 array is made up of three radio receivers, each the size of a large bucket or small trash can. They are located in Goldstone, Owens Valley, and Delta, Utah.

“With the help of co-author Konstantin Belov of JPL and Dan McKenna, an instrument engineer at Caltech, [Bochenek] helped find the three sites for the antennas and set them up,” the statement said.

Cake pans were used as an improvised fix to adjust the sensitivity of the instrument, Bochenek explained. “What we have done is a little strange for modern radio astronomy.”

The data gathered by the researchers indicates that a magnetar is not only the source of the FRB studied in April, but others as well coming from other galaxies, Ravi said.

Prior to the recent success, Ravi said the team was “skeptical this would even work.”

“Although we were very confident in the hardware, which was developed for the Deep Synoptic Array FRB-detection project, we gave STARE2 less than a 10 percent chance of actually detecting a burst,” he said. “Observations in coming years with STARE2 and its successors will tell us exactly how lucky we were.”

“I was very surprised when Chris told us the news,” Ravi said. “Until this blast, STARE2 had been operating for nearly 450 days without detecting anything besides the sun. This was a long-shot project, but Chris worked tirelessly to put it together and traveled to all the sites to set up the antennas. This is a huge reward for a graduate student. Caltech is a great place for ambitious students like Chris to shape their own projects.”

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