Not all fast radio bursts are created equal

Bailes, Matthew

doi:10.1038/d41586-019-03894-6

NEWS AND VIEWS
06 January 2020

Not all fast radio bursts are created equal

Astronomical signals called fast radio bursts remain enigmatic, but a key discovery has now been made. A second repeating fast radio burst has been traced to its host galaxy, and its home bears little resemblance to that of the first.

Matthew Bailes ⁰

Matthew Bailes
1. Matthew Bailes is at the Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Victoria 3122, Australia.
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Millisecond-duration, extragalactic radio flashes called fast radio bursts¹^,² (FRBs) present many puzzles that are strikingly similar to past mysteries concerning phenomena now known as quasars and γ-ray bursts. Like FRBs, these phenomena seemed to be uniformly distributed in the sky, but of almost impossible luminosity if cosmological in origin. Ultimately, it was revealed that quasars are associated with supermassive black holes, and γ-ray bursts with the formation of black holes after supernovae (stellar explosions) or with mergers of stellar remnants called neutron stars. Repeating FRBs provide the opportunity to identify the homes and possible progenitors of FRB sources. The first known repeater was localized to a star-forming region in a tiny, metal-poor galaxy³. Writing in Nature, Marcote et al.⁴ pinpoint the home of a second repeater and find it to be very different.

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Nature 577, 176-177 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03894-6

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