The Supermassive Podcast - 59: The Mystery of Fast Radio Bursts

Episode Date: December 5, 2024

The Supermassive Team are investigating strange blasts of energy in space called Fast Radio Bursts. What are they and where do they come from? Dr Stuart Ryder from Macquarie University in Australia joins Izzie, Dr Becky and Robert to help explain.  Christmas Present Ideas  Astronaut Chris Hadfield’s talk - A Journey into The Cosmos Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition at Royal Museums Greenwich Telescope SeeStar S50  Image stabilising binoculars Cosmos (book) from DK The Impossible Man by Patchen Barrs.  The Little Book of Cosmic Catastrophes by Sarah Webb The Night Sky Almanac for 2025 by Radmila Topalovic, Storm Dunlop and Wil Tirion Keep sending your brilliant questions and photos to [e-mail] or on Instagram @SupermassivePod. The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media production for the Royal Astronomical Society. The producers are Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham

The hardest to explain of these fast radio bursts are the ones that repeat. They saw us big flash and then nothing. They didn't see any other signals from that direction. Until just a few weeks ago, it ended up being the oldest fast radio burst ever to be detected. Hello and welcome to the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, science journalist Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst. Welcome to the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, science journalist Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smethurst. Now for all of you listening last month, I can confirm that we have actually decided on an episode topic finally.

It's the end of the year, okay? And this month it's all about mysterious blasts of energy in space called fast radio bursts. And as always, Dr Dr Robert Massey, the Deputy Director of the Royal Astronomical Society is here. So Robert, aside from these fast radio bursts being a bit of a mystery, what are they? Yeah, that's a great question. They're a bit of a mystery, what are they? Well, we can say what they're characterized by. So they're bursts of radio waves that are very short-lived and they are last anything from even a fraction of a millisecond, a fraction of a

thousandth of a second up to maybe about three seconds long. They're only discovered back in 2007 in data from 2001 from the Parks Radio Observatory in Australia. As it implies, they're in the radio spectrum. You don't see visible light with them, although it might be associated. Basically, these are radio bursts. And they were discovered by an astronomer originally from the UK, actually, who happened to be at Manchester at the same time as I was in the early 1990s, Duncan Lorimer. He's in West Virginia with his PhD student, David Narkovich. You must have been pretty chuffed really to be involved in this because at least his PhD super went on to win the Shaw Prize, which is hugely prestigious as a result.

They're mostly, I say absolutely mostly, but typically billions of light years away, although there seems to be one that was originating in our galaxy. They're really powerful. They give out as much energy in a thousandth of a second as the sun does in three days. That is 1.2 billion, billion, billion joules for those of you who are familiar with those units. Of of course, by the time the signal reaches the Earth from a distance of three billion light years, you're talking about something which is described as a thousand times less powerful than a mobile

phone on the Moon being detected on the Earth. So they're really weak by the time they get to us. They're also found all over the sky, and that's a characteristic which says that we think they're beyond the galaxy. were if they were distributed along the Milky Way in the sky, we think that's something originating in our own galaxy. They're not. They're all over the sky. So they're either they would either be very close, which is really unlikely or very distant, which we think is mostly the case. And we don't really know what they are. So the mystery holds, you know, they relate a bit to the weird stars we talked about last time. So very magnetically powerful neutron stars or magnetars or maybe supernovae as they collapse into black holes. And there might even be thousands happening every day that we just can't detect. So there are probably a lot of these things, very short-lived. We're not quite sure what they are yet. I don't know. It's just something about fast radio bursts. Like every time I sit in a talk

from someone studying them, it feels like they really are just sort of working on this like who done it mystery. You know, it's kind of like the gamma ray bursts of our generation, you know. So anyway, cheers Robert and we'll catch up with you later on the show for some questions and of course this month's Stargazing tips. Okay, so we know they're elusive, but what else do we know about fast radio bursts, also known as FRBs? And where did they come from? I spoke with Dr. Stuart Ryder from Macquarie University in Australia, who detects them. I personally reckon fast radio bursts are where it's at.

And until quite recently, all we knew about fast radio bursts was in the name. OK, so they are fast. So these are signals coming from somewhere in outer space that last only a few thousandths of a second. And it was only relatively recently where they had the technology to even listen with radio telescopes that fast in order to realize that there were signals that short in duration. Radio, because to date we've only ever detected these objects at radio wavelengths. And in fact, their emission doesn't even fill all of the radio band in most cases.

And bursts, because as the name implies, it's a short pulse of radiation, the majority of which we never see another burst coming from that location again, except for a few, maybe less than 10%, which we do see repeat bursts, but with no regularity to them, no period that we can associate with it. Just on that description alone, you would think, wow, what are these things? How can we have objects that are so brief in duration? What that tells us is that the object that emits them must be extremely compact. Because if the source of these fast-rated bursts was something the size of the sun, it takes light more than a second to cross the diameter of the sun. So it can't be anything the size of the sun, it takes light more than a second to cross

the diameter of the sun. So it can't be anything as big as the sun. Well, that's what I wanted to ask is like, what is our best idea of where they come from? Or is that just a big question mark over everyone's heads? Well, it's certainly not resolved. Right now, the leading candidate for the origin of these vast radio bursts are what we call magnetars. Now, magnetars probably don't mean much to many of your listeners either. They're relatively rare and recent phenomena themselves, but basically what they are, I presume most people have heard of a neutron star. So a neutron star is a very dense state of matter. It's typically the leftover remnant of a core collapse supernova explosion. If it was much, much bigger than

that, it might even collapse to a black hole, in which case becomes interesting for other reasons. But these neutron stars we know quite a bit about because many of them are what we call pulsars. We know that they spin very fast. They're very compact. They're typically only a few kilometers across. In other words, the size of a city. And yet they can still contain more than a sun's worth of mass. So extremely dense state of matter. And they can be rotating at tens to thousands of times per second. And if they do that, a lot of energy is being funneled out by their very strong magnetic field,

pushed out along the polar regions. And if this spinning object happens to line up with our line of sight, it's a bit like a lighthouse. We'll get this burst of radiation and then a short while later we'll get another one. Then exactly the same period later we'll get another pulse and so on. So these neutron stars, in many cases, are the pulsars. And a magnetar is simply a super magnetic version of a neutron star. So when did we first see them? Now, interestingly, the field of fast radio bursts didn't even exist before 2007. No one knew about these things. No one was even looking for them.

But some radio astronomers here in Australia, they were looking through some very old Parkes radio telescope data that had been taken back in 2001, in fact. And people thought they'd look through it pretty thoroughly for evidence of new pulsars that hadn't been picked up in previous surveys. But what they found in this Park's data from 2001 wasn't a regular beep beep beep beep pulse from a pulsar. They saw this big flash and then nothing. They didn't see any other signals from that direction, but it was so bright, they thought, well, it's got to be real. And so they put this object, this result into the journal Nature. And of course, there's a lot of skepticism. Well, how do you know it's real?

We've only seen one. It's too bright to be outside of our own galaxy because nothing we knew could be that luminous. It took a fair while before people began to accept these were real. It wasn't helped by the fact that a few years later, there was a case where some of these fast-radio bursts were being found with a Parkes Radio telescope, always around lunchtime every day. They couldn't work out why that would be the case until they discovered that people had been opening microwave ovens without waiting for them to finish. As they did that, this produced a signal that looked remarkably like a fast radio burst.

That didn't help, but never mind. Eventually, fast radio bursts were being discovered at other telescopes, including the now collapsed Arecibo telescope, the Green Bank telescope, and other facilities. So, it was no longer a parks-only phenomenon. Since then, we've gone on to find hundreds, thousands of them now. But they are still not a completely solved problem. Yeah, quite elusive. So what can they tell us? What can fast radio bursts tell us about our universe and put us into context?

Yeah, that's a great question. One of the strange things about fast radio bursts is that even though we don't yet fully understand what causes them, it turns out they're incredibly useful for telling us about the universe. Let me explain. The thing about a fast radio burst is the name implies it's a signal that lasts only a few thousand of a second and then shuts off. Now, when a signal like that, which is like a pulse, when that travels through space to us, it will pass through dust, gas, clouds, things like that. And being radio waves, they just pass right through almost unaffected.

But if there is any hot gas along the way, and particularly hot enough to be ionized, that is, the electrons have been stripped off atoms by supernova shock waves or nearby bright stars and so forth, when that pulse passes through that ionized medium, an interesting phenomenon happens called dispersion. That is that the pulse coming at the lower frequencies gets slowed down relative to the higher frequencies. And the more of this ionized material that the pulse has to pass through to get to us on Earth, the more stretched out that signal becomes.

So when you think about it, the signal that we ultimately receive at our telescope that has information about space between us and the origin of the object, encapsulated in that, if we could decode it. So, for instance, we could maybe figure out how much of that ionized material is there out in space. But to do that, we would have to know how far away the burst started. For that, we would need to know which galaxies they come from. And that has been one of the biggest challenges in fast radio burst research. And really only recently, they were being able to find ways around it. Niamh – This might be too tricky a question, but let's see. What is our best bet of what's going

on in, say if these fast radio bursts are from a magnetar, what is that mechanism that means that we get this big sort of pulse of radio waves? Yeah, well, that's a good question. As we used to say for a long time, there were more theories about what causes fast radio bursts than the word known fast radio bursts. That was the case for the first decade or so. Funnily enough, when you pressed our theorist colleagues for suggestions, they had no shortage of ideas. So, you know that you've seen pictures of the Sun quite recently, the Sun is a relatively well-behaved star, but it goes through these cycles of sunspots and solar activity every 11 years. We're currently going through the peak of another solar maximum. At that point, you see lots of sunspots, you see

lots of solar flares, you see evidence for the magnetic fields on the sun where these field lines get tangled and twisted up and eventually they snap. When they do that, they release enormous amounts of energy and charged particles that within a few days may reach us here on Earth and give rise to these spectacular aurora that I guess many people hopefully would have seen earlier this year, I think May and again in October. So imagine that type of phenomena where the magnetic fields twisted and broken up and releasing energy, but scaled, well in this case scaled down to a much more compact object like a magnetar, but in terms of the magnetic field strength, scaled up by factors of a billion. And you can maybe begin to conceive of a mechanism where you could

deliver or unleash an incredible amount of energy in a short space of time. The details are still very much to be worked out, but that seems to be the prevailing model that most people can live with. Others have suggested, well, it could even be things like asteroids crashing onto the surfaces of neutron stars because that's the sort of phenomena that probably wouldn't repeat very often. That might explain why most FRBs, fast-robusts, are only ever seen once. But, you know, maybe there are families of these asteroids that sort of come crashing down in a semi-random manner. All those things are open. We still have people claiming they might even be evidence for extraterrestrials, although that's the least likely explanation at the moment. But

who can say for sure. But for now, we'll stick with the magnetar hypothesis, because at least we can do calculations with that and try and develop some understanding around it. And we're going to hear more about the oldest fast radio bursts with Stuart in a moment. So Becky, outside of magnetars or extraterrestrials, Little green men. Are there any other ideas about where these fast radio bursts might come from? Or are magnetars the strongest theory? Yeah, I mean, there's still technically

not a generally accepted theory of what fast radio bursts are. But I think magnetar really is the front runner, especially after the detection of FRB 200428 back in 2020, which was actually a fast radio burst thought to be from inside our own Milky Way galaxy, after the detection of FRB200428 back in 2020, which was actually a fast radio burst thought to be from inside our own Milky Way galaxy, which we had never detected before. And it was traced back to a magnetar.

So that really is why that's the front-leading theory, but with just sort of, you know, one data point. It doesn't exactly make a full theory yet. That really is sort is a hypothesis. You know, but it could be that there's maybe not just one process that generates these fast radio bursts. There's people have been talking about this. Maybe many processes that could do this.

And so yes, of course we've talked about supernova or it could be like merging neutron stars or merging black holes or maybe even like it's the collapse of a pulsar like down into a black hole as well when a neutron star gets too heavy and then you've got like really exotic explanations like is it to do with cosmic strings and axions and all this kind of stuff so I think what's really interesting though is that the hardest to explain of these fast radio bursts are the ones that repeat yeah that we that we detect these fast radio bursts all the time coming from this one place and they're not just one-offs

And so a one-off like if you think about it, okay Well collapsing neutron star or collapsing supernova that that would make sense it being a one-off, right? But then these things are repeating so that brings us back to magnetars, etc, etc But then there are some people that argue that all fast radio bursts might repeat We just haven't served long enough to see them repeat Yeah fast radio bursts might repeat. We just haven't observed them long enough to see them repeat. Yeah. And that would obviously, if that would happen, it would rule out this idea of a collapse of something down

because then you wouldn't get anything more from it afterwards. So, so many ideas and it's why it's still such a young field, you know, like the first one was only detected, you know, less than 20 years ago. So there's still so many unanswered questions. And I feel like every research paper, you know, this is true of all science, but especially Fast Radio Burst, every research paper that answers one question raises about 10.

Exactly. And I think that's what's so exciting about Fast Radio Burst because it does feel so new that you're like, I know that if the answer is we just don't know, like, okay, it gets repetitive. But at the same time, that's really exciting. I think that is so exciting. I would say to people, like if you're a real true crime fan, but you want to become an astrophysicist, maybe you work in fast radio bursts. Okay, and so what are some of the biggest or the most prominent telescopes that are used to detect fast radio bursts? I mean, yeah, all the big

single dish radio telescopes have evolved in detections over the years. So like the original Lorimer Burst, you know, back in 2007, that was detected by the Parks radio observatory, at least in data from Parks a few years earlier. That's in New South Wales in Australia. People might know it as, you know, the dish, as people call it. It's a 64 meter wide telescope,

which very famously was used to receive the live television images of the Apollo 11 moon landings as well. So, you know, really rich history there. But then also, you know, you've got the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia, the GBT that's detected a few Arecibo in Puerto Rico as well, detected a few before it's suddenly collapsed a few years ago. Do you remember that? Is he after the hurricanes? Yeah, that was so sad. Yeah. So. Yeah, so the big, big classic radio dishes are always gonna detect something like this,

but the real workhorse of this field now is the CHIME radio telescopes. That stands for the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, which is up in British Columbia in Canada. And amazingly, this wasn't designed to do fast radio burst studies,? Of course it wasn't. It wasn't and it ever is right?

Yeah. So it's so wonderful that astronomy you get to get together with blue sky science right? It was designed to do cosmology and answer like why is the universe expanding and it was designed to you know look at things emitting radio light in the milky way and to do this they were like we'll just do a big survey of the sky every night with the chime telescope. Now these big like cylinders or like half cylinders or was like looking like like skateboarding ramp or half pipe that's what they look like half pipes right and they're just sort of letting the sky move over them every night and taking the survey of what they see

because turns out if you do that every single night, it's really helpful for detecting things that weren't there before. Yeah. Yeah. And things that do just burst randomly and happenstancely. So, I mean, before Chime, we knew a few tens, maybe hundreds of fast radio bursts. But then in 2021 alone, Chime was like, yeah, we detected 500 of these things. So-

It's like change, yeah. And so to be honest, like I knew time was running and you know, I knew it was just going all the time or whatever and everything. And in my head, I had the number of fast radio bursts that we knew as being, you know, tens and hundreds. I was sat in a seminar the other day in Oxford physics when someone started giving a talk on fast radio bursts and went, and this person went, well, as we know, we now know of over a thousand fast radio bursts. And I was like, we're in the thousand? When did that happen?

You know? I missed that email, sorry. Yeah. So, Chime really has been, you know, sort of the forerunner of getting these huge sort of populations of fast radio bursts. And that's really what's gonna help us crack this problem of what's producing them, because the more you have,

the more statistics you have, we can work out, is there multiple processes or is there a single process? So Chime, really gonna crack this problem of what's producing them because the more you have, the more statistics you have, we can work out is there multiple processes or is single process. So chime, really going to crack this case wide open. When it comes to detecting fast radio bursts, astronomers name them after the year, the month, and the day on which they were discovered. and then they give it a letter depending on whether it's the first, second, third or whatever burst. So Stuart told me about one that he detected with his team FRB 2022 0610A, the first fast radio burst reported on the 10th of June 2022. And until just a few weeks ago, it ended up being the oldest fast radio burst ever to be detected. Now compared with the 50 odd bursts that we had found with the

Australian SKA Pathfinder, the ASCAP telescope, this one had the highest dispersion measure, as we call it, that is amount of that stretching of the pulse across frequency of any of the bursts that we had found up until that point. So that was a hint that that pulse must have traveled through the largest amount of this ionized material, and presumably therefore the largest amount of space and the largest distance and the furthest back in time. And it turned out, based on the stretching of the emission lines from that spectrum, it was 1.016 redshift. Wow, we got a redshift one that that light or that radio light from that burst had traveled to us for almost 8 billion years. The universe is 13.7 something billion years old. So that means that

this burst had traveled for more than half the age of the universe to reach us. But if it had arrived just 20 years earlier, no one would have been listening for it. That's amazing. That makes you think of how, were there other signals that we just wouldn't have detected perhaps? I'm sure there are. Based on the rates at which we are now finding fast radio bursts, we believe that on any given day, there's at least 10,000

fast radio bursts arriving here on Earth, not all of which we can currently detect. But nevertheless, these are not a rare phenomena. They're actually quite common, but we've really only just latched onto them in the last 10, 20 years. It's been a real wild ride. What was that feeling like when you first come across that signal and you sort of done the numbers? You're like, no, surely not. Yeah, well, that was the first, no, I screwed this up again. When I first looked at the result, I just couldn't believe it. And just for a little while, I didn't want to tell my collaborators about it. I wanted to know, you think, I've got a secret. Yeah. I'm the only one who knows that we've got the most distant and the

wretched one FRB. That was pretty exciting. But again, I just thought, well, I'll just sit on this result for a while because it's just nice to think, this is really cool. This is what I get out of bed for in the morning to do this, make these occasional breakthroughs. How are you detecting these and what are you looking at when you're making these observations?

In order to get a good handle on the distance to the galaxy and the amount of space that this burst of travel through, the more distant galaxies, space is expanding faster at those distances and the light gets more and more stretched out. There are two emission lines that are quite close together in wavelengths and very distinctive pattern. So these oxygen 2 line, which are normally in the very blue part of the spectrum, I end up having to look in the very red part of the optical spectrum just to see where they landed. And similarly, the hydrogen alpha line, which is normally in that red part of the spectrum, was pushed out into the infrared part.

And so those are key, a bit like DNA fingerprints of a galaxy. If I see those features, I know that it's a star-forming galaxy because that gives rise to these strong emission lines. And that means even if the galaxy itself might be relatively faint by astronomy standards, those so-called emission lines, as the name implies, they stick out above that background and they can be relatively quick and easy to get a good measure of. Indeed, as we get to into the realm in the next decade or so, when we're going to be finding hundreds of fast-rated bursts every day, there's no way that we'll be able to get a spectrum for every single one of them. And so we're already beginning to plan ahead for how we're going to really capitalize on

the fantastic value that these bursts have for cosmology, especially at those larger distances, if we can't actually get an exact measurement of their distances. Well, it turns out, you know, if we get hundreds or thousands of them, even if any one of them is not particularly well constrained, but as an ensemble, we can do good statistics on those and hopefully get to the answers that we want, even if we can't do it as accurately as we can currently do for one object at a time. Yeah. And then for me, I would just love to know what is next for the field? You know, what excites you in going forward with studying fast radio bursts? Yeah, well, in fact, I've just come back from a conference that was held in Thailand just three weeks ago.

And somewhat to my disappointment, I was shown a spectrum from a rival team who had found a fast radio burst with an even higher dispersion than the object that we had. And they had gone off to try and confirm its distance. And in fact, their redshift is even greater than one I had. But we haven't given up. We had this weird

fast radio burst that we weren't able to see at host galaxy in the best ground-based telescopes. So we decided, what the heck, we'll go for broke. We applied for time on the James Webb space telescope. And we were lucky enough to be granted a few hours with that wonderful machine. We actually got an image of that location sent back to us about a month ago. Somewhat to our relief, there is definitely a faint smudge not far from the FRB's location. So, phew, there is something there. But I got to tell you, it's really faint. Although we've now requested a follow-up spectrum, and we've got our fingers crossed that maybe

there'll be enough photons, enough emission lines that this object might indeed turn out to be the most distant than the one we heard about just three weeks ago. Thank you to Dr Stuart Ryder from Macquarie University. This is the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst and the wonderful science journalist Izzy Clark. So considering the festive season has arrived, has barrelled towards us so quickly, we thought we'd do our usual gift guide for the astronomy lover in your life. So team, what presents would you recommend? Let's start with you, Iz. I think this year I'm going for experiences. That's the general vibe of my Christmas presents

this year, I think. And I was looking around. So Chris Hadfield is doing a talk. It's called A Journey into the Cosmos. And he's visiting various venues across the UK. So that's going on between, I mean, they're going to have to wait a bit. It's going on between the eighth and the 22nd of June, but- They're some of the most fun presents, right? Yeah, it's something to look forward to. Exactly, right? When you're in the depths of June, but... They're some of the most fun presents, right? It's like you've got something to look forward to. Exactly, right? When you're in the depths of January, like, you know.

You've got a mini Christmas in June. Lovely. Or, and this is something I've really got my eye on just for myself and my friends. We have like a little physics girls WhatsApp group. Nice. And there's the Astronomy Photographer of the year exhibition at the Royal Museums Greenwich in London. Even better, it's free.

So that might be a bit handy if people are feeling the pinch this year. But for me personally, I'm just hoping that someone gets me a C star S50 that we talked about last year. I just look at them like, shall I buy one? And then no doubt people message us on Instagram and like, I've got one, look at this amazing photo that I've taken. I'm like, well, this is really making me want one even more.

So. And not making her jealous at all. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, what about you, Robert? What would you recommend? Well, I mean, and if anybody wants to buy Izzy a sea star, they make an email podcast. Or a sea star themselves.

Exactly, we can arrange that. Wink email podcast. I'm sure we can. Exactly. We can arrange that. I'm just going to clip this off and just send it to them directly. Exactly. So, hey, I'm going to go with binoculars. I was thinking of this. I think, you know, everybody wants to go and look at the sky. So many people ask about small telescopes, which are just a little bit harder to get

into. But also like who has the space for a telescope sometimes. Exactly. There is a whole thing about the big mouth and the rest of it. Exactly. Exactly. So you need a bit of space for yourself, but binoculars are portable. They're very small. You can spend quite a range of money.

It's fair to say, you know, you can spend 50 quid and get something really good. You can spend a thousand quid and get something very good indeed or even more. But the point is that, you know, it's not unreachablereachable and that cost difference usually just reflects the quality of the optics. But even at the low end, they can be pretty good. So if you've got a lot of money to spend, you can also play around. I'm sure you've tried these. You get these image stabilizing binoculars, Canon makes some, and you press a button and the image miraculously stays still from your handshake. So actually for astronomy, they're quite good. You know, if you want to look up a, say a star cluster or something, you press

that and you just see more as well, because you know, the thing is holding still. So that, that I'd recommend having tried them. I don't know them myself, but I always enjoy using them. Uh, and you don't need a tripod so much then as well. So if you're looking for comments or something like that, they're healthy. Even if you put a, like binoculars on a tripod, as soon as my eyes touch it, they still shake. It's like my entire head is just there.

Yeah, the whole thing about house-making a tripod is exactly right, setting it up. That's more storage space as well, of course. Having said that, the low end, you can get good pairs even from companies like Celestron and Helios and so on, down to the few tens of pounds, like 10 by 50 binoculars, standard thing. Quite affordable. They'll show you a lot of the things we talk about each time, you know, the nebulae star clusters, comets, craters on the moon, all the good stuff that you want to see and you

might not have done already. So, you know, if you haven't got a telescope and you haven't got space for a telescope or the money for a telescope, then do consider that. Yeah, my binoculars I got for Christmas a few years ago were around the 100 quid mark and they had even like a coating on the lenses for astronomy in terms of like, you know, sort of like filtering out street lamps and stuff like that. So I used them to see the comet a few weeks back and they were great. I highly recommend binoculars.

That's just so much more flexible. You can take them with you on holiday. You know, you can look at bird watching and look at landscapes, all of those great things. So you know, definitely a good starting point. Exactly. Yeah, they're kind of, yeah, they're a catchall. Is that where you can see Taylor Swift from a distance.

That's how I see Taylor Swift, yeah. Although I'm too short, I also need like a box to stand on. But yeah. Disney's a box, they come in, it's right. That's an accessory. So, so Becky's Christmas list is an accessory pack with it. And actually that reminds me of an email that we've got from Adi in Canada, who said that, is it about Taylor Swift?

Yeah, it's not about Taylor Swift. It's actually about binoculars. Surprise, surprise Becky. And he said, I've been on a mission to binge the entire Supermassive Catalogue. Stargazing sections at the end of each episode inspired me to buy a set of binoculars and I even managed to capture the Pleiades from my backyard just using my phone. It's not the clearest though, but hoping to see Andromeda one day. Nice. They've attached the photo and it looks amazing. It's great.

I saw that. It's really good, isn't it? Really, really nice. So Becky, what's on your list? Oh, I just, nothing's better than a good book at Christmas for me. Just like curling up after like Christmas is all the waffles done and then I just, oh my nice little quiet time. If I can guess, I give a shout out to DK's Cosmos, which I wrote the foreword for because I think it's great. It's just the ultimate coffee table book, right?

It goes from everything from the solar system all the way through to the most distant things in the universe. And it's got some beautiful JDBrist tea images in there as well. Now it's books like that that just inspired me into science. So if anyone's looking for that kind of like inspirational book for someone this year,

I would definitely say Cosmos from DK, which is great. There's also a great new biography of Roger Penrose that's just come out as well. Yeah. Did you see this? Cause I mean, for those who don't know, Penrose was the guy who worked with Hawking on developing like the maths of black holes

and singularities and things like that. So that book is called The Impossible Man by Patron Bars. And it's a really interesting read. If you love the sort of humanity side of science and sort of the flawed genius kind of aspect of science, then it's a really interesting read. And then also the little book of cosmic catastrophes by Sarah Webb as well.

I saw this. It's just, I think it would be a great little stocking filler, you know, that's a really fun read, maybe for a teen or something like that. And then of course, no one would say no to a night sky guide, right? Like, I mean, even though we know the night sky, still knowing what's coming in 2025 is very, very helpful.

So the night sky almanac for 2025 by Radmila Topilovic, Storm Dunlop and Will Tyrion looks beautiful. I saw it in Blackwells the other day and I was just sort of like drooling over it. I had to be like dragged out of the store, like come on. No, there is something magical about going into a book store just before Christmas and you get the smell of books. It's so festive.

You're like, which one shall I buy? And who else am I buying for? And you're, oh, you know, someone's I would love this is like, but I would also love that. You should just be like one for them, one for me. The pile of books is bigger than my flat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But maybe if you buy enough books, you could you could construct some sort of telescope enclosure into a flat. Perfect. Yeah, multifaceted, great.

Anyway. We'll put all of those recommendations in the episode description so you have links and stuff to see that. And if you do get any, you know, like spacey Christmasy presents like do let us know because we love to live vicariously through other people. Yes, absolutely. Okay, so let's get on to some questions about fast radio bursts. Ginger Hulk on Instagram asks, can we start calling them Furbies?

Spelled F-R-B-I-E-S. And I am very much saying yes to that one. I just hope there's an astronomer somewhere now that sets up like their alert system, you know, for like any time there's an FRB detected with like a Furby sound bite. You know, the little laugh they used to do like, yeah, there's sort of demonic laugh, which is terrifying. Yeah. Love me.

Okay, so onto some other questions. Robert Hellengee on Instagram asks, are fast radio bursts something that we need to add to the dangerous things in space list? Oh, Helen, I mean, I think honestly, you know, particularly with a demonic laugh, you know, if you're gonna have an alert for these things, then absolutely no. I mean, probably not. They're mostly very, very far away. Even the closest one was 30,000 light years away. The intensity of it wasn't, you know, by the time it struggled that far, it's not that high. And they're very, very short lived. So that all of that helps. And I think they'd

have to be super close to do any damage within tens of light years, at least I'd probably be more worried about things like a nearby supernova. There's not much risk of either or a gamma ray burst. And again, those are quite rare events. You know, we're not really detecting them in our galaxy so that you can probably rest easy. The only thing I would say is I'd be a bit more confident if we knew exactly what they were. That would really help. You know, if you want to reassure people knowing what they are is helpful, but I'm not going to

lose too much sleep over this. Okay, that's good to know. And Becky Craig on email asks, what's the nearest FRB that's been discovered? Well, Robert Stormer Thunder, if you're paying attention in the last question. But Craig, I want to answer for you anyway. I will always spoke about FRB 200428 before, right? That was the one that was detected in our own Milky Way galaxy that we think is coming from a magnetar.

That's what it's been traced back to. So that magnetar is 30,000 light years away. And so that's what we think is the closest one, but you know, there is still a chance that it just happens to be a background foreground alignment thing. Although the sort of amplitude, the sort of brightness of the signal we detected

suggested it was in the Milky Way as well. But then if you're thinking about the closest extra galactic fast radio burst, then that would be FRB 2020120E. They really need to work on the naming. You know, but. They make sense to the, it's a bit of chime, I'm sure.

That was detected in 2021 by Chime and that's in the galaxy Messier 81, which is the most gorgeous spiral galaxy you ever did see. Honestly, next chance you get, Google it. You'll not be disappointed. And that galaxy is around 12 million light years away. So this is what Robert was saying. We don't need to worry about these things,

like they're so far away that, we'd all need to sleep at night. Okay, fine. And you can see the M81 with a pair of binoculars. Yes, you can. Just saying. Just saying. There we go.

There are some major, it's not too hard. Oh my God, cue all of the photos, which I'm very, you have to be fair. The ones with those sea stars. Oh, I thought I was just gonna say that. No! No! No! No! to be fair. They're the ones for those sea stars. Oh, I thought I was just going to say that. No!

And Robert Yasmin has messaged to ask, how do astronomers know they've detected a fast radio burst? Can they be confused with other signals? Yeah, that's a really good question, Yasmin. I think the answer is, it's like so many things, it's the characteristic of the signal that matters. So they're very short-lived. That's a starting point.

They don't usually repeat, although there are some exceptions and they're really powerful. So those things together, these point sources that have a characteristic spectrum and they emit in such a way that the highest frequencies come first and then the lower frequencies after that. All of those things combined together to remove sources of confusion, unless of course we're talking about that microwave oven incident back you know, back in 2010. And I did find the paper which it was soberly called identifying the source of peritons at the PASC radio telescope. Oh, peritons. What a flashback. Which you can read in the monthly notes. It's in the monthly notes, it's the RAS,

but actually, so yeah, you can look it up and see that. But yeah, realistically, most the time it should be possible to find them and distinguish them. Amazing. Okay. Well, thank you to everyone who sent in questions. And if you want to send us more for a future episode, then please do. You can email podcast at ras.ac.uk or find us on Instagram at supermassivepod. So Robert, let's finish as usual with some stargazing. So what can we see in the night sky? Yeah, so look, we're absolutely in winter in the Northern Hemisphere now. So yeah, you know, I think noticeably-

Astronomically speaking, I think you'll find that winter starts on the 21st of December this year. Meteorological winters on the 1st of December. I'm not going to have these, we're going to have these on this year. But it's certainly cold anyway. So yeah, so it means Orion is back, which is the really lovely winter constellation near the brightest one in the sky, basically two first magnitude stars, really obvious later in the evening, the belt and then four bright stars around that, including Raja, which is blue and Betelgeuse, which is red. And you can even, I was sent a photo by a friend of mine with a mobile phone and her photo showed the colours of those stars. So even a mobile phone is enough to show that Beetlejuice is a bit red and Orion

is quite blue. You can see it with your eyes in a dark sky. Absolutely. But it just shows how well that they stand out. And yeah, again, actually a pair of binoculars really pulls out colors in stars too in bright ones. So do look at it. It's always a fabulous sight and you can also find things like the Orion Nebula and more generally a lot of other faint stars in the same region too. So you know do enjoy the view. This December though is also really good for planets so we've got Saturn still around in the evening sky with its now very thin ring. Sorry Becky get disappearing next year, you know real sadness but it'll be back

and at sunset Venus is really dazzling in the evening sky and if you have a small telescope in this case You'll see it looks like a half moon phase That'll show slowly shrink over the month as it gets closer to the earth and it gets bigger, too And there's also a nice pairing on the 4th and 5th of December. It'll be close to the crescent moon in the sky So, you know, that's a that's a good photo target in the East Jupiter is really pretty much It's an opposition on the 7th of December, so that means that it's opposite the Sun in the sky and it's closest to the Earth. Really lovely target, very, very obvious.

Again, get a Propeller. You'll see those four bright, big Galilean moons. It's so bright at the minute. It gets to the point where even I don't believe that it's Jupiter anymore because it's also so low in an evening when you're out and about and you notice things when it's Jupiter anymore because it's also so low in an evening right when you're sort of like out and about and you sort of notice things when it's dark so I keep thinking it's like the light on top of a crane or there's like a house on a hill in the distance somewhere and it's just no it's Jupiter. It's Jupiter. It's so bright and that's it because when you're looking at the night sky you're like that is where Jupiter would be but it's so bright that I always have to

get scenario about just to like check, this is Jupiter, yes? I'll wait for an email from Becky Smithers saying, is this aliens? Dear podcast, no. You're quite right though. It does really stand out, and particularly when it's low early in the evening, you think it might be a plane or something like that. But the main thing is. Do you remember that story of that person who rang the police? The one of the police thought it was a drone chasing them somewhere in the US, right?

But it was stupid the last time it was the opposition. This is how it is folks. Please don't phone us about that. But it's yeah, I mean, exactly. And you know, and it'll be really good over the next few months. And then finally, anyway, for planets, we've got Mars is on the scene too. And that's getting brighter and it'll be at its best, I think, January, February. It's not as good as it was a few years ago, but still, if you've got Mars is on the scene too and that's getting brighter and it will be at its best I think January February it's not as good as it was a few years ago but still if you've got a decent telescope you know you can see a

small disk and dark markings and actually that always to me illustrates just how hard it is to see things on it from the earth you know people imagine Mars is like this world that oh you just point telescope you see all this stuff it's really really difficult actually really small target on the whole however and the final thing then is that this month's obviously the solstice, so it does mean the shortest day if you're up here in the Northern Hemisphere, a low sun during the day, but also a really high full moon, which is called the cold moon, unimaginatively, or the moon before yule, which is a bit more romantic in Anglo-Saxon, and that's going to be on the 15th of December.

So what I would say is, or even the day before the day after, go out and have a look the day before or the day after, or the day itself if it's clear. And just genuinely marvel at how bright the landscape is with a winter full moon. It's really high up. You can be able to wander around your garden without a torch. It's not a problem. Even if you live in an area with no lights, you look out and you see the whole moonlit landscape and that already photograph all as well, you know, just shows you how much natural light if it's frosty, it'd be beautiful. Yeah, the only downside this year is it's going to interfere with the gemini meteor shower, which is the same night the 15th of December. So if you're out, you'll see a few you won't see quite as many because the full moon but I would say just go out and enjoy the view. It's absolutely pretty. It's, you know, winter full moons are really quite special. Heather Hyslop Oh, I'm going to put that in my diary. Do you know what I also put in my diary the other day was the planet alignment on the 25th of January. So I'll be ready.

Heather Meehan Spoiler for next year. Next month. Paul Matz Exactly. Heather Hyslop Well, that's it for this month and we'll be back next time with our final episode of the year on the scientific search for extraterrestrial life. Yeah, exactly. And there'll be a bonus episode in a few weeks time as well. So, we'll take on more of your questions, you know, because you just keep sending them.

Please keep sending them. Yes, we love them. We will keep asking you because the next line in the script for me is contact us if you try some astronomy at home it's at supermassivepod on Instagram or you can email your questions to podcast.ris.ac.uk and of course we will try and cover them in a future episode but until next time everybody happy stargazing!