Scientists from Pennsylvania State University were able to identify one very remarkable feature. They found that mysterious 'cosmic whistles', also known as fast radio bursts, can accompany serious explosives, and in some cases, gamma rays can be released up to a billion times more than occurs in the radio range, which can compete with stellar cataclysms like supernovae.
Fast radio bursts were first detected in 2007, and in the following years, radio astronomers discovered several dozen similar events. Although they last milliseconds at any one frequency, their distance from Earth and the large amount of intermediate plasma delay their arrival at lower frequencies, allowing the signal to propagate for seconds or more, leading to the characteristic 'whistle' across the range a typical radio receiver.
“This discovery allows us to change the existing picture of fast radio bursts, some of which appear to manifest as a whistle and as an explosion,” – explained Derek Fox, professor of astronomy and astrophysics. 'The radio whistle can be detected with ground-based radio telescopes, while the gamma burst can only be caught by high-energy satellites such as NASA's Swift probe. The speed and distance of fast radio bursts indicate that whatever they are, they are a relatively common phenomenon, occurring somewhere in the universe with a frequency greater than 2000 times a day. '
The detection of the 'explosion' of gamma radiation from the fast radio burst 131104, the first non-radio analogue of any burst, was made possible by the Swift satellite, which observed exactly that part of the sky where the fast radio burst 131104 occurred. This event was also observed in the form of an explosion and radio telescope at the Parkes Observatory in Australia.
“Swift is constantly observing the sky for X-ray and gamma-ray bursts,” said Neil Gerels, chief mission investigator and head of the Astrophysics Physics Laboratory at NASA's Mission Control Center. “But the discovery of this flash from one of the mysterious and fast radio bursts is truly amazing.”
“While theorists have speculated that the burst may be accompanied by gamma rays, the gamma rays that we see from 131104 are surprisingly long and bright,” Fox said. The duration of this gamma radiation is from two to six minutes, which is many times longer than the duration of milliseconds of radio emission. In this case, the gamma radiation from the burst 131104 dwarfs its radio emission by more than a billion times. '
