Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What are fast radio bursts and what causes them?

Episode Date: September 26, 2019

Learn about the mystery behind fast radio bursts with Daniel and Jorge Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is about how you get your podcast. Hey, Jorge, I have a question for you about how you use your microwave. This is about how I am preparing my dinner on it or not? No, this is. is about whether you wait for it to stop and ding or whether you impatiently yank the door open before it's finished. Yeah, I think sometimes I open it without waiting for it to end. Is that bad? Am I going to get irradiated? Is that dangerous? It's not dangerous to you.

Is it dangerous for my pets or my dinner? Everybody in your house is perfectly safe, but you might be ruining the life of some graduate students nearby if they're running a particularly sensitive science experiment. Well, they're welcome to come. in my popcorn. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I always wait for the ding. Well, wait no more. And welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe. a production of iHeart Radio.

In which we look around the universe and try to explain it to you. We find crazy, interesting, amazing, mind-blowing stuff that scientists hardly understand and try to bring you to that forefront of misunderstanding. That's right. All the weird and unexplained phenomena out there and also safety tips for your microwave oven usage. That's right.

We dove in the details of how microwaves work on a recent episode. But today we're going to talk about how microwaves might ruin everything for science. It's just one of these physics destroys the universe kind of things. Like will my microwave collapse the Higgs field somehow? No, no. Maybe microwaves will save the universe by stymying physics, right? What if with your microwave oven, you could stop the LHC from operating?

Is that a setting? Maybe I miss that setting. Is it like reheat, defrost, ruin science? You know, that brings up a good point because microwaves have so many settings that I think probably nobody ever uses, right? People only ever use the popcorn button and the like add one minute button. Yeah, I always wonder if there's like a secret code, you know? Like video, you know how some video games have like a special sequence?

You can unlock special features. Oh, up, up, down, down, left, right, AABB, and all of a sudden you're playing video games on your microwave. Yeah, there you go. I'm sure, I'm sure, but no, microwaves don't hold secrets to the universe, but they have been known to stymie the progress of physics. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. Yeah, and it ties into how sometimes, you know, how sensitive sometimes science is. That's right. If you want to listen to something which came all the way from the other side of the universe, you have to listen very carefully.

And that means you're going to be listening to tiny little signals from space and also every signal from Earth nearby is going to be trying to drown that out. So scientists have to get really good at figuring out all the other things that could mimic their signal, all the turn. terrestrial sources of noise. They have to get really good at telling everyone else to turn out their cell phones, basically. That's right. Scientists are like those grumpy neighbors telling you to turn down your music, except they want you to turn down everything. So to the end of the program, we'll be talking about...

Fast radio bursts, or fast and mysterious radio bursts. That's right. What's the official title of these? I think they're called fast radio bursts, but they are definitely mysterious. and a bunch of listeners have written in and said please explain fast radio bursts to us so here we are. Are they also furious?

That would be pretty good branding. Fast and furious radio bursts. No, because then they'd owe money to Vin Diesel every single time we mentioned it. That would be a movie, right? That's what they should do. That'd be like Fast and Furious 17. They go into a radio telescope

and drive it around the telescope. You know, I love those. movies because every single one, they somehow managed to, like, one up the previous one. You know, the last one, they had a submarine. Here they have, like, a helicopter with a submarine attached to it, swinging around a rocket ship. It's incredible. Do your physics senses cringe when you watch these movies? No, no, they usually get the physics pretty much accurate on those movies. You know, there's no science fiction here. It's mostly just trajectories and explosions. Yeah, it's pretty accurate. Yeah, so there's something called fast radio waves, and there are, they are

kind of mysterious, right? Nobody knows where they come from. That's right. Nobody knows where they come from. And there's sort of a recent mystery. They were discovered only 12 years ago by a summer student, like an undergrad. Have you ever had this science experience where you go to do a summer undergraduate project and somebody just says, here, go plow through all this data? Maybe is a way to get rid of you. Maybe as a way to just keep you busy. And nobody ever expects to accomplish anything. Well, this didn't did. Well, I can't say I've had the experience of being an undergrad scientist. But it's pretty cool to think, yeah, that someone who's that young can discover something nobody else had done before.

Yeah, exactly. And it's cool to think. We've discovered something as recently as 2007. Absolutely. And it's just another example of how every time we look out into the universe, we find weird stuff. The universe is just chock full of unexplained, really bizarre. phenomena, and each of them, each of them is a clue that there's something going on out there that we don't understand. Some new type of objects, some new kind of physics, some new kind of

life. Who knows? But each one is the universe sending us a message saying there's something here to learn. There's something mysterious in your microwave. Open it. Open it. If you've been cooking that popcorn since 2007, then you're in trouble. I'm still waiting for it to stop popping. You know, it still pops every once in a while. Yeah. And the, um, the, the, um, the The other lesson to be learned here is that while this was discovered by an undergraduate, his advisor got all the credit for it. The undergrad got no credit? Well, you know, the professor sent him off and said,

here, spend your sum of looking through this old data, maybe you'll find something interesting. And then he came back with this saying, like, look at this huge, weird pulse I found. What is that? And now it's named after the professor. Well, he did direct the student to look for it. So, you know, that's like, that's obviously fair. Yeah, right. Yeah, like Einstein supervisor, right? Go be smart. All right, well, now I get credit for all your discoveries. Well, I had never heard of these fast radio bursts, much less any fast, mysterious radio bursts. But we were wondering how many people out there had. Maybe something that was in the news or something. Daniel went out and asked people on the street if they knew what a fast radio burst was.

That's right. Several of our listeners were curious about it, but I was wondering, is this something that sort of seeped into the common understanding? Is this a mystery that people think about or have even heard about? Yeah, so think for a second if random scruffy physicists approach you on the street and ask you, hey, what's a fast radio burst? What would you say to a microphone? Here's what people had to say. I have heard of it, but I don't know what it is. I've heard of them. I couldn't tell you about them. But, yeah, I have heard of them. No. No, I have not. All right.

Not a lot of people knew about these fast radio birds. Yeah, pretty much zero. I mean, some folks claimed have maybe heard of them, but I didn't really quiz them on it. I was being generous. So not a lot of... You mean you think that maybe they were lying? Like maybe they hadn't really heard of it,

or they was just trying to sound smart. Yeah, maybe a little bit. You know, somebody talks about some brand new topic in science to you. You might not have long and be like, oh, I think I heard about that. I'm not sure. Or maybe just tickle some memory you had in your mind. Anyway, nobody's even...

What do you think I do on this podcast every time, Daniel? I'm just nodding along. Well, you're doing a great job of faking it. So most people have never heard of Fast Radio Burst. Exactly. And so I hope that those folks out there who have never heard of Fast Radio Burst will be amazed at what they learn today about this crazy, mysterious, amazing signal from the stars.

All right, so let's break it down. Now, so the name of it doesn't sound very complicated. I mean, it's just fast radio burst. So I think I know what each of those words mean. But together, they form something mysterious. Well, you're assuming that physicists have been clear in their naming and that you can sort of reverse engineer the concept from the name of it. So I'm proud that you have such confidence in our skills.

Well, I'm just wondering how they're able to get this to the trademark office, you know? Like, it's such a generic name, fast radio bursts, you know. No, you're right. It's like trademarking brown table cloths, you know. I'm not sure it's been copyrighted or trademarked. But, you know, for our upcoming movie starring Vin Diesel, then we'll definitely want to get on that. Which is called The Fast and the Burstee. Yeah, exactly.

No, you're right. It's pretty straightforward. I mean, these are bursts of emissions in the radio spectrum, right? And remember, radio waves are just one kind of electromagnetic radiation. You have radio waves down at the long wavelength part of the spectrum, and you've got visible light, you know, hundreds of nanometers, and then you get up to x-rays and gamma rays, the very high energies, very small frequencies.

So remember what you call, it just depends on the frequency of the electromagnetic radiation we're talking about, and radio waves are down at the lower end. Meaning that they are low frequency, relatively speaking. So these guys have really long wavelengths, so have lower frequency. And these kind of radio waves that we're talking about, they're like 1,400 megahertz. So 14 million times a second is the frequency of these waves. Yeah, exactly.

And you know, that's the same kind of frequency as the electromagnetic radiation that's used to send you radio into your car, right? Which is why we call them radio waves. All right. There are lots of sources of radio waves in the universe, right? like black holes make radio waves, the center of galaxies make radio waves, the sun makes radio waves, you know, Jupiter makes radio waves. Radio towers make radio waves. Exactly. Vin Diesel, I think, has his own radio station now, but there's lots of sources and there's a huge field of radio astronomy, right? And mostly these

things are just sort of like pulsing out continuous radiation. But in 2007, they heard for the first time this fast radio burst. So burst means like it's not continuous. There's just like, It's like somebody screaming in space, right? It's a very short-lived. That sounds a little horrific. So it's just a fast radio burst. It's just like a quick pulse, like a quick burst of these low-frequency light waves, which we call radio waves. Exactly.

And by burst we mean like order milliseconds, right? It's not like gamma-ray burst that last, you know, two seconds or 30 seconds. These are milliseconds. So they're very, very brief, which is why they were a really. originally overlooked. You know, when this underground found them, he didn't like hear them for the first time. He went back into old data. He found this like it had already been recorded.

The data was just sitting there. Nobody had looked through it and seen this before. It was very short-lived, which I guess why it didn't trigger any alarms or anything. And it was just a one-time event that he discovered. You could listen to these on the radio. Does that mean like if you had the radio tuned to the right frequency, you would hear a little every once in a while? Yeah, you can, you can do radio astronomy using your radio.

radio, right? You can listen to that kind of stuff. You can hear some of the static that you hear from radio is radio waves from the sun or from Jupiter or from the center of the galaxy, right? Space is filled with these things and some of them get down to Earth. Wow. Yeah, so you can listen to the universe. The sound of the universe is shh, doesn't have great rhythm. The universe is telling you to shut up. You know, this is a burst of energy and it's not that loud. Like, it's not like, This was a huge spike that he noticed. It was a little bit of a blip, you know. It's not very loud, but it's above the general noise, right?

It was large enough to be seen above the, just the sort of radio noise you get from the sun or Jupiter from the center of the galaxy. And it was odd. And so he asked this advisor, he said, you know, what's this? What could make this? And the guy had no idea. You know, we hadn't ever seen such a short-lived pulse of energy. So this undergrad was combing through some data and he saw these little blips. Like, all of a sudden, this signal at that frequency kind of jumped.

Yeah, but just one blip. Just one blip. Yeah, exactly. And you've got to wonder, like, what is this summer project? He just, like, gave him a pile of data and said, look through this, see if you find anything. You've never done that, Daniel? I don't do that to my students. No, I give them, like, supervision.

I set them up. I tell them, like, try this, try that. I'm just saying, like, that's like saying go to the basement, the library, figure it out. see if you find anything interesting. You know, you've got to give them some more direction than that. But this kid actually found something amazing. Yeah, maybe you should try it. All right.

Next summer, I'm sending all my students to the basement of the library, just comb through random particle physics data. You might find some new phenomenon named after you. That's right. I'm just going to print out all the LHC data into a huge pile and tell them to comb through it. No, so there was this short-lived pulse, right? And he didn't understand it.

He'd never seen anything. like it before. They were very curious about it. But it was the only one anybody had ever seen. So they started going back and looking through old data to see, could they find more? And did they? They did, but then they ran into a bit of a snag. See, a lot of people were wondering, like, where does this come from? How do you know that this actually comes from space, right? And it doesn't just come from, like, some other source of noise, because there's huge numbers of sources of radio waves, right, like all the radio stations on Earth, right? So before you can conclude that something,

is really is astronomical, you have to rule out everything else. And there aren't... Like maybe at the local radio station, the DJ accidentally hit the button and created these little pulses.

Yeah, although, you know, in this frequency range, radio stations don't emit. And, you know, radio stations have a certain frequency range that they're allowed to transmit on. And this one in particular is reserved for radio astronomy, right? So the sky is supposed to be quiet

in this frequency so that we can. and listen to the universe. But, you know, there are known sources and interference here and there. And nobody had ever seen this kind of thing, so they had to sort of track it down. And when they were looking through the old data, they found a bunch of them

from this one observatory in Australia, the Parks Observatory. What do you mean? Like, everybody started looking through their old data or this was done in Australia? Everybody started looking through their old data, but the folks in Australia looked through theirs, and they found a whole bunch of these little blips.

and they thought, well, there's no way that these are all astronomical. And because of the way the antenna was pointed, they got a clue that some of these blips might actually be from something nearby. And this cast a huge shadow on the initial discovery. People thought, well, if these blips they're seeing in Australia are just something here on Earth,

then what are the chances that this 2007 discovery is actually some weird signal from space? Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit more. But first, a quick break. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills, and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face.

When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. as a result of it, if it's going to be beneficial to you. Because it's easy to say, like, go you, go blank yourself, right? It's easy. It's easy to just drink the extra beer. It's easy to ignore, to suppress, seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just, like, walk the other way.

Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials is easier. Drinking is easier. Yelling, screaming is easy. Complex problem solving, meditating, you know, takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Plus, the stories and events off the court and, of course, the honey deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very fancy, wonderfully experiential sporting event. I mean, listen, the whole aim is to be accessible and inclusive for all tennis fans, whether you play tennis or not. Tennis is full of compelling stories of late. Have you heard about Icon Venus Williams' recent wildcard bids? Or the young Canadian, Victoria Mboko, making a name for herself? How about Naomi Osaka getting back to form? To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain,

an Iheart women's sports production in partnership with deep blue sports and entertainment on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. So what do you mean, the way the antenna was pointed? Like, it was pointing downwards or, you know, to my house or somebody's house? Or what do you mean? The biggest clue to understanding where something comes from is when do you see it, right? Do you see it when you're pointing at the sky?

Do you see it when you're pointing always the same direction on Earth? Or do you see it when you're like always pointing at the same thing in the sky? Like, if you point your antenna at the same star and then you always see a signal, you wonder, oh, maybe it comes from that star. But if your antenna is, if you always see the signal when you're pointed at like, you know, some nearby building, then you wonder if it comes from that building. And so in this case, they had clues from when they saw these signals that it might be coming from something nearby instead of from something in space because it didn't correlate to any particular direction in space. Oh, I see. So it's like if you hear voices in your head, no matter which way you're standing or who you're surrounded by, then maybe the voices are not coming from outside of your head.

No, that's a perfect analogy. That's a perfect analogy. So they started to worry that maybe some of these things were coming from something nearby. I mean, the guys are not insane. They're not coming from actually inside their head. But they had to try to track this down. And it took them years and years and years, but they finally figured out that one of the sources of these things was not actually astronomical, crazy stuff happening out there in space. But it was the staff at the observatory going on break.

they correlated the times but here we're just talking about that one observatory in Australia right not the one found by the undergrad that's right the one in Australia had a bunch of these and so people thought well you know maybe none of these things are real then they figured out that they would see a very similar kind of pulse when the staff at this observatory in Australia would heat up their food on break and open the door to the microwave before it stopped cooking and it was this brief moment of interference like, you know, when you open the door to the microwave, of course, the microwave shuts off. But this is like a little blip, a little blip of radiation that comes out. It's not dangerous levels, but it is enough to interfere with the operation of a super

sensitive ear, right? That's what a telescope is. It's a super sensitive ear. And so they correlated this to when those guys were going on break. And they verified it, like, went over to the microwave and tried it. And they could tell that that's what was creating some of those signatures. So it was picking up the actual microwaves coming from the oven or just like the act of shutting down the microwave emitter in their oven when you open the door that somehow creates, you know, emits radiation in this weird frequency. There was a little bit of microwave energy that actually escaped. Yeah. And if you waited for this to ding and the microwave turned off before you opened it, then none of it escaped. But if you just yanked the door open

before it was finished, then this little blip would sneak out. And that's what would cause some of these fake astronomical signals. So my microwave operates at the same radio frequency, says radio? It's enough to interfere. Yeah, exactly. The frequency spectrums overlap a little bit. And it was hard to pin down because sometimes the staff would let the microwave ding. And other times, they were a little more impatient and they would yank it open.

So it wasn't like every single day at 6 p.m. It was like that one guy or that one woman, just, you know, Bob or Sally, the impatient one in the staff that just was making all this fuss for everybody. Yeah, exactly. I remember when this paper came out, it was like 2015, the paper came out when they identified the source of these things as literally like microwave background. And, you know, because we had this other thing in physics called the cosmic microwave background, there were a lot of jokes about Australian microwave background. versus cosmic microwave background. Like, this is literally a background due to microwaves in Australia. They actually published this.

They said, we had a bunch of signals, but it turned out to be Bob with the microwave. Exactly. No, it's a hilarious paper. And, you know, it's a nice piece of work. You know, you got to really dig into your signal sometime and understand where they come from. And the folks, for example, at LIGO, the ones looking for gravitational waves, they do similar sort of stuff. They have to understand, like, traffic patterns. They also open the microwave too early.

Yeah, well, everything affects them. They're looking for tiny little shakes. So they have to understand, like, oh, at this time of day, big trucks tend to roll by, and that shakes it in this certain way, and blah, blah, slams the door nearby, two miles away. They're super sensitive. So they have to catalog all the sources of noise before they can identify something as a signal. So in the same way, you see a weird signal on your data. You've got to try to rule out, you know, prosaic explanations.

and this was one. And so until they did that, people didn't really believe that fast radio bursts might actually be an astronomical thing because of this explanation. But once they isolated this explanation, they were able to remove those.

They could tell which ones came from microwave ovens and which ones didn't. Then people started to believe, okay, maybe these other ones, you know, from other observatories, actually are something astronomical. You mean the ones that were found by the undergrad?

Or did people find other ones. The one found by the undergrad, people now think is believable, and people have been combing through data, and they found just under a hundred other examples. A mysterious, fast radio bursts. Yeah, exactly. And now that we've removed, you know, Bob's microwave usage as an explanation for some of them, we can start to believe that these really do come from space. All right. So Bob did something good. Bob delayed the understanding of radio bursts for at least five years. So I'm not sure you can give them any positive points for that. By creating an artifice, it kind of sharpened scientists' ears. So now they can sort of tell when something is

artificial or not. And so now maybe you have more confidence that the ones you've seen are actually mysterious radio bursts from space. Yeah, I'm amazed at your ability to spin that into a positive story. Yes, nicely done. Well, Bob slipped me 100. So it's put in a good word for her. Yeah, Bob or Bob's sister, whoever did this. needs a serious reputation rehabilitation program. No, but since then, we've identified something on the order of 100 or just less of these examples in data from around the world. All right, well, let's get into what could be making these mysterious radio bursts

and whether or not you should wait for the ding in your microwave. But first, let's take a quick break. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adapted strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it if it's going

to be beneficial to you. Because it's easy to say like go you go blank yourself, right? It's easy. It's easy to just drink the extra beer. It's easy to ignore, to suppress, seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just, like, walk the other way. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials is easier. Drinking is easier. Yelling, screaming is easy.

Complex problem solving. Meditating. You know, takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it? maybe you felt stuck in a job, a place, or even a relationship. I'm Emily Tish Sussman, and on she pivots, I dive into the inspiring pivots of women who have taken big leaps in their lives and careers.

I'm Gretchen Whitmer, Jody Sweeten. Monica Patton. Elaine Welter-off. I'm Jessica Voss. And that's when I was like, I got to go. I don't know how, but that kicked off the pivot of how to make the transition. Learn how to get comfortable pivoting because your life is going to be full of them. Every episode gets real about the why behind these changes.

and gives you the inspiration and maybe the push to make your next pivot. Listen to these women and more on She Pivotts, now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The U.S. Open is here. And on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain, I'm breaking down the players from rising stars to legends chasing history. The predictions will we see a first time winner and the pressure. Billy Jean King says pressure is a privilege, you know. Plus, the stories and events off the court. the honey deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open.

The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very fancy, wonderfully experiential sporting event. I mean, listen, the whole aim is to be accessible and inclusive for all tennis fans, whether you play tennis or not. Tennis is full of compelling stories of late. Have you heard about Icon Venus Williams' recent wild card bids? Or the young Canadian, Victoria Mboko, making a name for herself. How about Naomi Osaka getting back to form? To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain,

an Iheart women's sports production in partnership with deep blue sports and entertainment on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports. All right, Daniel, so what can make these mysterious, fast radio bursts? We were hearing them from space. we're pretty sure it's not Bob with the microwave accidentally causing this noise.

So something must have caused these 100 weird signals that we see. Something or someone, right? That's always the question. You know, what you do in astronomy, I guess, not being an astronomer, is you see some new weird signal

and then you look through your category, you look through your catalog of stuff in the universe and ask, could this make that noise? Could this make that noise? And there's nothing out there that we know of and there's a lot of crazy stuff out there making all sorts of strange signals but none of the things that we are aware of can make this kind of pulse what do you mean nothing you're aware of like doesn't the sun make uh radiation and radio waves or do you know

like how do you know the that the sun isn't making these birds yeah well they're not coming from the direction of the sun right they come they come from all over the sky and if you ask like where do they come from in general they don't even come in general from the direction of the Milky Way like if there was something from our galaxy then you'd expect it to come from something sort of in the plain of the Milky Way you know that band of stars you see like dribbled across the sky

if it's something from our galaxy some like weird kind of star in our galaxy you'd expect to see it more in the direction in the Milky Way but we don't we see in all sorts of directions which means it's most likely coming from outside our galaxy they're definitely not all coming from the sun

that'd be easy to figure out you know they're not coming from our galaxies so it must be something super far away, which means at the origin, it must be like a super powerful burst. To be able to hear something, to be able to see a signal from so far away means that it has to be incredibly intense at its source.

Remember, these other galaxies, I mean, our galaxy is huge, right? It's 100,000 light years across. But these other galaxies, they're millions of light years away. And, you know, if we sent a signal to those galaxies,

even if we directed it, it would be pretty hard for, anybody to hear it because these signals drop by one over the distance squared. So you go twice as far. The signal is four times as quiet. You go a thousand times as far, right? And the signal is a million times quieter. So to be able to hear it from so far away exactly means that at the source, it has to be crazy intense. And we also just don't know anything to make crazy intense and very brief sort of sad trombone sounds. What do you mean as a sad trombone? Well, if you look at the frequencies, the frequency sort of shift. It's not like at a single frequency. It starts off

at a higher frequency and then it drops quickly to a lower frequency. So it sort of sounds like a sad trombone. You know, like a, wow. Oh, I see. So maybe it's just the universe providing a soundtrack to my comedy. Every time you make a bad joke, we hear a fast radio burst. We'd be hearing a lot more of them. That's all I got to say. That's right. Every time I say a bad joke, you know, got up there, hits the button and the audience gets a little Yeah, so how powerful

are these then? Well, we're not exactly sure. Some of them we've located, like a few of them have repeated, so we've been able to, like, spot exactly where they're coming from because we've heard them more than once. But estimates are that they have as much energy in just one of these pulses as

our sun puts out in 80 years of burning, right? So, it's frying you, it's causing summer, it's, you know, toasting mercury, all that energy put out by the sun over 80 years, concentrate that into a few milliseconds. That's the amount of energy we're talking about. If what we're hearing is coming from another galaxy, then that's how powerful it must be when it happens. It must be like some kind of explosion or some big event. It's definitely some kind of big event. And, you know, we don't have a whole lot of data because we only have like, you know, less than 100 examples. And each one is really really

brief. You don't have a lot of information in each one. It's not like you have a long extended tail you can study. But we can do really clever tricks. We can like ask like, you know, what's the arrival time in this frequency versus the other frequency? And we can use that to think about like how it propagates through the universe because different kinds of stuff in the universe allow different frequency signals to propagate at different speeds or block them or whatever. So we have these thing, it's called the dispersion measure that tells us, like, how spread out is the signal. And all these things are totally consistent with a really small source really, really, really far away.

What do you mean a small source? Meaning that the thing that makes these can't be really big. It's not like an entire galaxy is emitting this thing. It's something that's like a few hundred kilometers across. Wait, how do we know this? Because of the way, sort of the shape of a pulse, right? First of all, it's really, really short, right? So if you have some huge object that's creating a signal and it's really enormous,

then you're going to hear a longer signal just because if it comes from the back of it, it'll take longer to get to you, right? But if it comes from a tiny little source, like a point or something like a meter across, then it's possible to create a really, really tight signal. And so because this thing only lasts a millisecond, then it can give us a sense to like a rough, an order of magnitude estimate for the size the object that's making it. If something really big makes a really big pulse,

then just the physics of it wouldn't allow it to create something so sharp. Yeah, exactly. You need something really small to create a really sharp signature. And, you know, this is the kind of thing we do in physics. We're like, let's squeeze as much information as we can out of this tiny little bit of data. And so that's what we know. It's something super far away, kind of small, and really intense. And there's just nothing in our catalog of knowledge that's capable of producing that.

Let's jump right into. What could it be? Aliens. You know aliens are on the top of my list for sure. Is it Azuse? I think you always put aliens at the top of your list, Daniel. No, astrophysicists are very creative bunch. And so what they do when they're sitting in front of this kind of mystery is they try to get creative.

And they say, well, what if we take something which is capable of creating radio waves and is really intensely powerful, like a magnet. tar. Remember what a magnetar is? It's a super category of neutron star, right? A neutron star that's spinning. And that's different than a minotaur, right? That's right. It's at the center of the maze. No, it's a pulsar that's super duper powerful and has a crazy magnetic field. And they're looking at things that have a lot of magnetic fields because this is EM radiation. So they're thinking maybe it's some weird twist in a magnetic field that the magnetic field buckles and shocks or whatever. and that creates these pulses.

And so one category of ideas is like maybe it's like an earthquake on the surface of a magnetar that creates like a little burst of energy, a little shockwave of energy. What? Yeah, and even that's not enough. An earthquake on the surface of a star. Yeah, starquakes, right? That sounds like an awesome science fiction novel. Starquake, yeah.

Yeah, and so they call these things hyperflare, when a magnetar just like bursts out a big explosion of energy. But even those hyper players. Like it cracks somehow or, you know, like a, yeah, like it cracks or like it shifts. Yeah, well, think about what happens in an earthquake. Exactly. These, the plates rub up against each other. You get a release of energy.

So it's not an exact analogy to what's happening on the surface of this magnetar in another galaxy, but it's similar. And even that, the calculation suggests, is not enough to power these things. So now they're thinking about like one, happens, and then maybe another one follows it, and the two interfere in this way that gives this first one a boost. I mean, they're having to really reach to the bottom of the barrel here to come up with explanations for what might explain these things.

And there are other models as models like, maybe it's some strange thing that happens when a black hole eats a neutron star, although by now we've seen a few of those with our gravitational wave detectors, and they don't always come with fast radio bursts. So I think that explanation is not as popular. But the signals from the gravitational waves are sort of similar, aren't they? Aren't they also like a sad trombone and also really short? Yeah, but they have a sort of a ringdown effect. They're like a wong, won, won, won, wah, wah, won.

And I think they're longer than just a few milliseconds, but actually I don't remember the details. Another explanation which I love only because the name is awesome is people think it might be this kind of star called a blitzar. A blitzar. Yeah, a blitzar. Named after a wolf blitzer. Yeah, of course. You're in the situation room, and you've got to come up with an explanation, and so you reach for the blitzer.

And your beard just radiates energy, and they call it the blitzer. That's right. And that's going to be the plot for the next movie with Vin Diesel and Wolf Blitzer, right? There you go. Fasten the Blitzie. Part 17. Blitzar is a special kind of pulsar that sometimes collapses in. turns into a black hole.

And I don't know why they call it a blitz are, but they think that maybe when that happens, perhaps it releases this kind of energy, but, you know, people are really stretching. When it's becoming a black hole, it cries out one less blitz. Yeah, exactly. It's like it's,

maybe that's where it comes from. It's the death rattle of a pulsar, perhaps. All right, but that's just one possibility, another possibility, and what else could it be? Well, there are other crazy ideas, like maybe it's some strange quantum mechanical effect. You know,

there are really weird quantum mechanical things that happen in every star like you know how does light get from the inside of a star out into the universe right that requires quantum mechanical things like tunneling which we talked about in another podcast episode and so some people have come up with this strange quantum mechanical entanglement effect called super radiance when a big blob of the star sort of gets entangled and and this can happen like if you're really close to the center of a galaxy and when a big blob of stuff becomes sort of quantum mechanical on a macroscopic scale,

they can do things that the individual blobs can't necessarily, and one of the ideas is this super radiance that they can emit huge pulse of energy all at once. But this is really

one of the more fringe theories. Wait, the idea is that the whole sun, the whole star, sort of becomes quantum synchronized or something? Is that the idea? Not the whole star,

that would be cool, but sort of a large blob of But, you know, and a large blob is 100 kilometers or something. So that would be pretty awesome. We do sort of similar experiments on Earth. It's related. Bose-Einstein condensates are materials where a bunch of stuff has the same quantum state. And so it has a macroscopic properties.

But those are usually super tiny, aren't they? Aren't they, like the size of a few atoms or something? Yeah, we've never succeeded in building one that's, you know, that's really macroscopic. That's like, you know, meters wide for sure. No, we never, never achieved that. But there is a relationship between that kind of thing and these sort of super radiance effects. But it's all, this is all just speculation.

And the thing I love about this is we have the data, right? This is not just people sitting around thinking, maybe this happens inside of stars. Maybe this thing. Let's give this thing this funny name. Here we're trying to explain something real, right? The universe is telling us there's this new, weird thing out there. you do not know about, and it's a clue, right? It's a clue that we have to unravel.

And in decades to come, somebody will understand what causes these things. And it could be something new and amazing and crazy. Or it could just be like, you know, some new phase of the life of a neutron star. And you're pretty sure it's not Bob with the microwave down in the kitchen. Look, Bob's been fired. Okay, so he's not creating any more problems. But maybe he went to work somewhere else or she went to work somewhere else. No, they're much more careful now with the microwaves at Radio Association.

astronomy facilities. But that is one of the funnest papers I've ever read. No, they've ruled out. But it could be, it could be an alien, an alien bob somewhere else in the universe, opening its giant, super radiant, blitzer star early, too early, before the ding causing these things. You know, I've never heard that explanation. I think you might have solved this right here live on the podcast, okay? Oh, there you go. Noble Prize, please.

Yeah, the Nobel Prize for that one is just a bag of popcorn. Actually, it was my undergrad who came up with that explanation, but I am taking all the credit. At least, share the popcorn with them, will you? All right, so that's yet another incredible mystery out there in the universe that we are pretty sure is there, but we can't explain what is causing it. That's right. The universe is telling us, here's a clue, there's something weird you don't understand, figure it out. And we're only a decade in, and we still basically have no idea what this thing is. thing is. So the next time you reheat

something in your microwave, for the love of science, please wait for it to ding. All of science, thanks you for your patience. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear

from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or Email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge.com. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devin.

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