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

0:08
Speaker 1: Hey, Jor, I have a question for you about how
0:11
Speaker 1: you use your microwave. It's about how I am prepared
0:15
Speaker 1: my dinner on it or not. No, this is about
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Speaker 1: whether you wait for it to stop and ding, or
0:20
Speaker 1: whether you impatiently yanked the door open before it's finished. Yeah.
0:24
Speaker 1: I think sometimes I opened it without waiting for it
0:26
Speaker 1: to end. Is that bad? Am I going to get irradiated?
0:30
Speaker 1: It's that dangerous. It's not dangerous to you. Is it
0:34
Speaker 1: dangerous for my pets or my dinner? Everybody in your
0:37
Speaker 1: house is perfectly safe, but you might be ruining the
0:40
Speaker 1: life of some graduate students nearby if they're running a
0:42
Speaker 1: particularly sensitive science experience. Well, they're welcome to come sharing
0:46
Speaker 1: my popcorn. Hi am or hammy cartoonist and the creator
1:06
Speaker 1: of PhD comics. Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist,
1:09
Speaker 1: and I always wait for the ding. Well, wait no more,
1:13
Speaker 1: and welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe,
1:16
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio in which we look
1:19
Speaker 1: around the universe and try to explain it to you.
1:22
Speaker 1: We find crazy, interesting, amazing, mind blowing stuff that scientists
1:26
Speaker 1: hardly understand and try to bring you to that forefront
1:29
Speaker 1: of misunderstanding. That's right, all the weird and unexplained phenomena
1:34
Speaker 1: out there, and also safety tips for your microwave of
1:38
Speaker 1: a usage. That's right. We dove into the details of
1:41
Speaker 1: how microwaves work on a recent episode, but today we're
1:44
Speaker 1: going to talk about how microwaves might ruin everything for science.
1:48
Speaker 1: It is one of these um physics destroys the universe
1:51
Speaker 1: kind of things, like little mic microwaves collapse the Higgs
1:54
Speaker 1: field somehow. No, no, maybe Marcos will save the universe
1:58
Speaker 1: by stymying physics. Right, what if with your microwave and
2:01
Speaker 1: you could stop the LHC from operating? Is that a setting?
2:04
Speaker 1: Maybe I missed that setting? Is it like reheat defrost
2:09
Speaker 1: ruined science? You know? That brings up a good point
2:11
Speaker 1: because microwaves have so many settings that I think probably
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Speaker 1: nobody ever uses, right, only people only ever use them,
2:18
Speaker 1: like the popcorn button and like add one minute button. Yeah.
2:21
Speaker 1: I always wonder if there's like a secret code, you know,
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Speaker 1: like videos. You know how some video games have like
2:26
Speaker 1: special sequence. You can unlock special up, down, down, left, right,
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Speaker 1: A A B B, and all of a sudden, you're
2:33
Speaker 1: playing video games on your microwave. Yeah, there you go.
2:38
Speaker 1: I'm sure, I'm sure, but no, microwaves don't hold secrets
2:42
Speaker 1: to the universe, but they have been known to sty
2:44
Speaker 1: me the progress of physics. And that's what we're gonna
2:47
Speaker 1: be talking about today. Yeah, and it ties into how
2:50
Speaker 1: sometimes you know, how sensitive sometimes science is. That's right.
2:54
Speaker 1: If you want to listen to something which came all
2:56
Speaker 1: the way from the other side of the universe, you
2:58
Speaker 1: have to listen very carefully, and that means you're gonna
3:00
Speaker 1: be listening to tiny little signals from space. And also
3:05
Speaker 1: every signal from Earth nearby is going to be trying
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Speaker 1: to drown that out. So scientists have to get really
3:11
Speaker 1: good at figuring out all the other things that could
3:14
Speaker 1: mimic their signal, all the terrestrial sources of noise. You
3:17
Speaker 1: have to get really good at telling everyone else to
3:20
Speaker 1: turn other cell phones basically, that's right. Scientists are like
3:24
Speaker 1: those grumpy neighbors telling you turn down your music, except
3:26
Speaker 1: they want you to turn down everything. So to the
3:29
Speaker 1: under program, we'll be talking about fast Radio berths or
3:37
Speaker 1: Fast and Mysterious were your birth that's right. What's the
3:40
Speaker 1: official title of these? I think they're called fast Radio bursts,
3:43
Speaker 1: but they are definitely mysterious, and a bunch of listeners
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Speaker 1: have written in and said, please explain fast radio burse
3:50
Speaker 1: to us, So here we are. Are they also furious?
3:52
Speaker 1: That would be pretty pretty good branding Fast and Furious
3:57
Speaker 1: radio berths. No, because then they money to Vin Diesel
4:01
Speaker 1: every single time we mentioned it. That would be a movie, right,
4:05
Speaker 1: that's what should do that. That would be like Fast
4:07
Speaker 1: and the Furious seventeen. They go into a radio telescope
4:12
Speaker 1: and drive it around the telescope. You know, I love
4:15
Speaker 1: those movies because every single one they somehow managed to
4:19
Speaker 1: like one up the previous one. You know, the last
4:22
Speaker 1: one they had a submarine. Here they have like a
4:24
Speaker 1: helicopter with a submarine attached to it, swinging around a
4:28
Speaker 1: rocket ship. It's incredible. Do your physics sense is cringe
4:30
Speaker 1: when you watch these movies? No, No, they usually get
4:32
Speaker 1: the physics pretty pretty much accurate on those movies. You know,
4:35
Speaker 1: there's no science fiction here. It's it's mostly just trajectories
4:38
Speaker 1: and explosions. Yeah, it's pretty accurate. Yeah. So there's something
4:42
Speaker 1: called fast radio waves and there are They are kind
4:46
Speaker 1: of mysterious, right, Nobody knows where they come from. That's right.
4:48
Speaker 1: Nobody knows where they come from, and they're sort of
4:50
Speaker 1: a recent mystery. They were discovered only twelve years ago
4:55
Speaker 1: by a summer student, like an undergrad. Have you ever
4:58
Speaker 1: had this science experience to where you go to do
5:01
Speaker 1: a summer undergraduate project and somebody just says, here, go
5:05
Speaker 1: plow through all this data. Um, maybe as a way
5:08
Speaker 1: to get rid of you, maybe as a way to
5:10
Speaker 1: just keep you busy, um, And nobody ever expects to
5:12
Speaker 1: accomplish anything. Well, this student did. Well. I can't say
5:16
Speaker 1: I've had the experience of being an undergrad scientist. Um,
5:20
Speaker 1: but it's pretty cool to think, yeah, that someone who
5:23
Speaker 1: who's that young can discover something nobody else has done before. Yeah, exactly.
5:27
Speaker 1: And it's cool to think we've discovered something uh as
5:31
Speaker 1: recently as two thousand and seven. Absolutely, And it's just
5:35
Speaker 1: another example of how every time we look out into
5:38
Speaker 1: the universe we find weird stuff. The universe is just
5:41
Speaker 1: chock full of unexplained, really bizarre phenomena, and each of them,
5:47
Speaker 1: each of them is a clue that there's something going
5:49
Speaker 1: on out there that we don't understand, some new type
5:52
Speaker 1: of objects, some new kind of physics, some new kind
5:54
Speaker 1: of life. Who knows, But each one is the universe
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Speaker 1: sending us a message saying there's something here to learn.
6:01
Speaker 1: There's something mysterious in your microwave. Open it, open it right.
6:05
Speaker 1: If you've been cooking that popcorn since two thousand and seven,
6:07
Speaker 1: then you're in trouble. I'm still waiting for it to
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Speaker 1: stop popping. You know, it's still pops every once in
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Speaker 1: a while. Yeah. And the the other lesson to be
6:15
Speaker 1: learned here is that while this was discovered by an undergraduate,
6:19
Speaker 1: his advisor got all the credit for it. The undergrad
6:21
Speaker 1: got no credit. Well, you know, the professor sent him
6:24
Speaker 1: off and said, hey, spend your summer looking through this
6:26
Speaker 1: old data. Maybe you'll find something interesting. And then he
6:29
Speaker 1: came back with this saying, like, look at this huge
6:32
Speaker 1: weird pulse I found. What is that? And now it's
6:35
Speaker 1: named after the professor. Well, he did direct the student
6:40
Speaker 1: to look for it, so you know that's like, uh,
6:43
Speaker 1: that's obviously fair. Yeah right, yeah, like Einstein's supervisor. Right,
6:47
Speaker 1: go be smart. All right, Well, now I get credit
6:49
Speaker 1: for all your discoveries. Well I had never heard of
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Speaker 1: these fast radio burs, much less any fast mysterious radio burs,
6:57
Speaker 1: But we were wondering how many people out there had maybe,
6:59
Speaker 1: may you something that was in the news or something.
7:02
Speaker 1: Daniel went out and asked people on the street if
7:04
Speaker 1: they knew what a fast radio burst was. That's right,
7:07
Speaker 1: several of our listeners were curious about it. But I
7:09
Speaker 1: was wondering, is this something that sort of seeped into
7:12
Speaker 1: the common understanding? Is this a mystery that people think
7:15
Speaker 1: about or have you even heard about? Yeah? So I
7:17
Speaker 1: think for a second, if random scruffy physicists approach you
7:21
Speaker 1: on the street and ask you, hey, what's a fast
7:23
Speaker 1: radio burst? Well, would you say to a microphone. Here's
7:28
Speaker 1: what people had to say. I have heard of it,
7:30
Speaker 1: but I don't know what it is. I've heard of them.
7:32
Speaker 1: I I couldn't tell you about them, but yes, I
7:36
Speaker 1: have heard of them. Uh no, no, I have not.
7:40
Speaker 1: All right, not a lot of people knew about these
7:42
Speaker 1: fast radio birsts. Yeah, pretty much. Zero. I mean some
7:45
Speaker 1: folks claimed have maybe heard of them, but I didn't
7:48
Speaker 1: really quiz them on it. I was being generous, So
7:51
Speaker 1: not a lot of I mean you think that maybe
7:53
Speaker 1: they were lying, like maybe they were they hadn't really
7:56
Speaker 1: heard of it, But they were just trying to sound smart. Yeah,
7:59
Speaker 1: maybe a little bit. You know, somebody talks about some
8:01
Speaker 1: brand new topic in science to you, you might not
8:03
Speaker 1: have long be like, oh, I think I heard about that.
8:05
Speaker 1: I'm not sure. Or maybe it just tickles some memory
8:08
Speaker 1: you had in your mind. Anyway, nobody, what do you
8:11
Speaker 1: think this podcast? Every time? Daniel, I'm just nodding along. Well,
8:18
Speaker 1: you're doing a great job of faking it. So and
8:21
Speaker 1: then most people have never heard of a fast radio
8:23
Speaker 1: burse exactly. And so I hope that those folks out
8:26
Speaker 1: there who have never heard of fast radio burse will
8:28
Speaker 1: be amazed at what they learned today about this crazy, mysterious,
8:32
Speaker 1: amazing signal from the stars. All right, so let's break
8:35
Speaker 1: it down now. So the name of it doesn't sound
8:38
Speaker 1: very complicated. I mean, it's just fast radio bursts. So
8:42
Speaker 1: I think I know what each of those words mean,
8:44
Speaker 1: but together they form something mysterious. Well, you're assuming that
8:49
Speaker 1: physicists have been clear in their naming and that you
8:52
Speaker 1: can sort of you reverse engineer the concept from the
8:55
Speaker 1: name of it. So I'm proud that you have such
8:58
Speaker 1: confidence in our skill. Well, I'm just wondering how they
9:01
Speaker 1: were able to get this through the trademark office, you know,
9:04
Speaker 1: like it's such a generic name, fast radio burs you know,
9:09
Speaker 1: you're right, it's like trademarking um brown table table cloths.
9:14
Speaker 1: You know. I'm not sure it's been um copyrighted or
9:18
Speaker 1: trademarked UM, but you know, for our upcoming movie starring
9:21
Speaker 1: Vin Diesel, then we'll definitely want to get on that.
9:23
Speaker 1: You call it the Fasten the birst tea. Yeah, exactly, No,
9:26
Speaker 1: you're right, it's pretty straightforward. I mean, these are bursts
9:30
Speaker 1: of emissions in the radio spectrum, right, and remember radio
9:34
Speaker 1: waves are just one kind of electromagnetic radiation. You have
9:38
Speaker 1: radio waves down at the long wavelength part of the spectrum,
9:41
Speaker 1: and you've got visible light, you know, you know, hundreds
9:44
Speaker 1: of nanometers, and then you get up to X rays
9:46
Speaker 1: and gamma rays, the very high energies, very small frequencies.
9:50
Speaker 1: So remember what you call it just depends on the
9:52
Speaker 1: frequency of the electromagnetic radiation we're talking about. And radio
9:56
Speaker 1: waves are down at the lower end, meaning that they
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Speaker 1: are low frequency relatively speaking. So these guys have really
10:03
Speaker 1: long wavelengths so have lower frequency, and these kind of
10:06
Speaker 1: radio waves that we're talking about, they're like four hundred megaherts,
10:09
Speaker 1: so fourteen million times the second is the frequency of
10:14
Speaker 1: these waves, yeah, exactly. And you know that's the same
10:17
Speaker 1: kind of frequency as the electromagnetic radiation that's used to
10:21
Speaker 1: send you radio into your car, right, which is why
10:24
Speaker 1: we call them radio waves. All right. There are lots
10:27
Speaker 1: of sources of radio waves in the universe, right, Like
10:31
Speaker 1: black holes make radio waves, the center of galaxies make
10:34
Speaker 1: radio waves, the Sun makes radio waves. You know, Jupiter
10:37
Speaker 1: makes radio wave. Powers make radio waves exactly. Vin Diesel
10:42
Speaker 1: I think has his own radio station now. But there's
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Speaker 1: lots of sources, and there's a huge field of radio astronomy, right,
10:48
Speaker 1: and mostly these things are just sort of like pulsing
10:50
Speaker 1: out continuous radiation. But in two thousand and seven they
10:53
Speaker 1: heard for the first time this fast radio bursts. So
10:56
Speaker 1: burst means like it's not continuous, it's just like it's
11:00
Speaker 1: somebody screaming in space. Right. It's very short lived. That
11:04
Speaker 1: sounds a little horrific. So it's just so fast. Radio
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Speaker 1: burst is just like a quick pulse, like a quick
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Speaker 1: burst of these low frequency light waves radio waves exactly.
11:18
Speaker 1: And by burst we mean like order milliseconds, right, It's
11:21
Speaker 1: not like gamma ray bursts that lasts you know, two
11:24
Speaker 1: seconds or thirty seconds. These are milliseconds, so they're very
11:28
Speaker 1: very brief, which is why they were originally overlooked. You know,
11:31
Speaker 1: when this underground found him, he didn't like hear them
11:33
Speaker 1: for the first time. He went back into old data.
11:36
Speaker 1: He found this like it had already been recorded. The
11:39
Speaker 1: data was just sitting there. Nobody had looked through it
11:41
Speaker 1: and seen this before. It was very short lived, which
11:44
Speaker 1: I guess why I didn't trigger any alarms or anything.
11:47
Speaker 1: And it was just a once, one time event that
11:49
Speaker 1: he discovered. You could listen to these on the radios.
11:52
Speaker 1: I mean like if you had the radio tune to
11:53
Speaker 1: the right frequency, you would hear a little every once
11:56
Speaker 1: in a while. Yeah, you can. You can do radio
11:58
Speaker 1: astronomy using your radio. Right, you can listen to that
12:01
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. Um, you can hear. Some of the
12:03
Speaker 1: static that you hear from radio is radio waves from
12:07
Speaker 1: the Sun or from Jupiter or from the center of
12:09
Speaker 1: the galaxy. Right. Space is filled with this, kidding, and
12:11
Speaker 1: some of them get down to Earth. Yeah, so you
12:14
Speaker 1: can listen to the universe. The sound of the universe
12:16
Speaker 1: is s doesn't have great rhythm the universe is telling
12:22
Speaker 1: you to shut up. You know, this is a burst
12:25
Speaker 1: of energy and it's not that loud. Like, it's not
12:29
Speaker 1: like this was a huge spike that that he noticed.
12:33
Speaker 1: It was a little bit of a blip. You know. Um,
12:35
Speaker 1: it's not not very loud, but it's above the general noise, right,
12:38
Speaker 1: it was large enough to be seen above the just
12:40
Speaker 1: sort of radio noise you get from the Sun or Jupiter,
12:43
Speaker 1: from the center of the galaxy. And it was odd,
12:45
Speaker 1: and so he asked his advisor. He said, you know,
12:47
Speaker 1: what's this? What could make this? And the guy had
12:49
Speaker 1: no idea. You know, we had never seen such a
12:51
Speaker 1: short lived pulse of energy. So this Undergraund was combing
12:55
Speaker 1: through some data and he saw these little blips like
12:58
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, this, uh, the signal at that
13:01
Speaker 1: frequency kind of jumped. Yeah, but just one blip, just
13:05
Speaker 1: one blip, yeah, exactly, and you gotta wonder, like, what
13:08
Speaker 1: is this summer project? You just like gave him a
13:11
Speaker 1: pilot data and said, look through this, see if you
13:13
Speaker 1: find anything. You've never done that, Daniel, I don't do
13:17
Speaker 1: that to my students. No, I give them like supervision.
13:19
Speaker 1: I tell I set them up, I tell them like
13:21
Speaker 1: try this, try that, and just say like that's like saying,
13:24
Speaker 1: go to the basement of the library, figure it out.
13:27
Speaker 1: So if you find anything interesting, you know, you gotta
13:29
Speaker 1: give them some more direction than that. But this kid
13:32
Speaker 1: actually found something amazing. Yeah, maybe you should try it
13:36
Speaker 1: all right, next summer, I'm sending all my students to
13:38
Speaker 1: the basement the library. Just combed through random part of
13:41
Speaker 1: physic data. You might find some new phenomenon named that
13:44
Speaker 1: for you. I'm just gonna print out all the LEDC
13:48
Speaker 1: data into a huge pile and tell them to comb
13:52
Speaker 1: through it. No, so there was this short lived pulse, right,
13:55
Speaker 1: and he didn't understand it. He never seen anything like
13:57
Speaker 1: it before. They were very curious about it, but it
14:00
Speaker 1: was the only one anybody had ever seen. So they
14:02
Speaker 1: started going back and looking through old data to see
14:05
Speaker 1: could they find more? And did they They did, But
14:08
Speaker 1: then they ran into a bit of a snag. See,
14:10
Speaker 1: a lot of people were wondering, like where does this
14:12
Speaker 1: come from? How do you know that this actually comes
14:15
Speaker 1: from space? Right? And it doesn't just come from like
14:18
Speaker 1: some other source of noise, because there's huge numbers of
14:21
Speaker 1: sources of radio waves, right, Like all the radio stations
14:24
Speaker 1: on Earth. Right, so before you can conclude it something
14:27
Speaker 1: it really is astronomical, you have to rule out everything else.
14:31
Speaker 1: And there are maybe at the local radio station, the
14:34
Speaker 1: DJ accidentally hit the bun and created these little yeah,
14:40
Speaker 1: although you know in this frequency range, radio stations don't emit.
14:43
Speaker 1: And you know, radio stations have a certain frequency range
14:46
Speaker 1: that they're allowed to transmit on, and this one in
14:48
Speaker 1: particular was reserved for radio astronomy. Right, so the night
14:53
Speaker 1: the sky is supposed to be quiet in this frequency
14:56
Speaker 1: so that we can listen to the universe. But you know,
14:58
Speaker 1: there are known sources and interference here and there, and
15:01
Speaker 1: nobody had ever seen this kind of thing, so they
15:03
Speaker 1: had to try to sort of track it down. And
15:06
Speaker 1: when they were looking through the old data, they found
15:08
Speaker 1: a bunch of them from this one observatory in Australia,
15:12
Speaker 1: the Park's observatory. What do you mean, like everybody started
15:15
Speaker 1: looking through their old data, or this was done in Australia.
15:19
Speaker 1: Everybody started looking through their old data. But the folks
15:21
Speaker 1: in Australia looked through there and they found a whole
15:24
Speaker 1: bunch of these little blips, and they thought, well, there's
15:27
Speaker 1: no way that these are all astronomical, and because of
15:31
Speaker 1: the way the antenna was pointed, they got a clue
15:33
Speaker 1: that some of these blips might actually be from something nearby,
15:36
Speaker 1: and this cast a huge shadow on the initial discovery.
15:39
Speaker 1: People thought, well, if these blips they're seeing in Australia
15:42
Speaker 1: are just something here on Earth, then one of the
15:45
Speaker 1: chances that the two thousand seven discoveries actually some weird
15:48
Speaker 1: signal from space. Yeah, let's talk about that a little
15:51
Speaker 1: bit more. But first quick break, So what do you
16:06
Speaker 1: mean the way that antenna was pointed, like it was
16:09
Speaker 1: pointing downwards or you know, to my house or somebody's house,
16:13
Speaker 1: or what you mean. The biggest clue to understanding where
16:15
Speaker 1: something comes from is when do you see it? Right?
16:18
Speaker 1: Do you see it when you're pointing at the sky?
16:20
Speaker 1: Do you see it when you're pointing always the same
16:22
Speaker 1: direction on Earth? Or do you see when you're like
16:24
Speaker 1: always pointing at the same thing in the sky, Like
16:26
Speaker 1: if you point your antenna at the same star and
16:29
Speaker 1: then you always see a signal, you wonder or maybe
16:31
Speaker 1: it comes from that star. But if your antenna is
16:34
Speaker 1: if you always see the signal when you're pointed it,
16:36
Speaker 1: like you know, some nearby building, then you wonder if
16:39
Speaker 1: it comes from that building. And so in this case,
16:41
Speaker 1: they had clues from when they saw these signals that
16:44
Speaker 1: it might be coming from something nearby instead of from
16:47
Speaker 1: something in space, because it didn't correlate to any particular
16:49
Speaker 1: direction in space. Oh, I see. So it looks like
16:52
Speaker 1: if you hear voices in your head, no matter which
16:54
Speaker 1: way you're standing or who you're surrounded by, then maybe
16:59
Speaker 1: the voices are not coming from outside of your head. No,
17:02
Speaker 1: that's a perfect analogy. That's a perfect analogy. So they
17:04
Speaker 1: started to worry that maybe some of these things were
17:07
Speaker 1: coming from something nearby. I mean, the guys are not insane,
17:10
Speaker 1: they're not coming from actually inside their head. But they
17:13
Speaker 1: had to try to track this down, and it took
17:15
Speaker 1: them years and years and years, but they finally figured
17:18
Speaker 1: out that one of the sources of these things was
17:21
Speaker 1: not actually astronomical crazy stuff happening out there in space,
17:26
Speaker 1: but it was the staff at the observatory going on break.
17:32
Speaker 1: They correlated the times. But here we're just talking about
17:35
Speaker 1: that one observatory in Australia, right, but not the one
17:38
Speaker 1: found by the undergrad that's right, the one in Australia
17:40
Speaker 1: had a bunch of these, and so people thought, well,
17:43
Speaker 1: you know, maybe none of these things are real. Then
17:45
Speaker 1: they figured out that they would see a very similar
17:47
Speaker 1: kind of pulse when the staff at this observatory in
17:50
Speaker 1: Australia would heat up their food on break and open
17:55
Speaker 1: the door to the microwave before it stopped cooking, and
17:58
Speaker 1: it was this brief moment of interfering. RAN's like you
18:00
Speaker 1: know when you open the door to the microwave. Of
18:02
Speaker 1: course the microwave shuts off, but this is like a
18:05
Speaker 1: little blip, little blip of radiation that comes out. It's
18:08
Speaker 1: not dangerous levels, but it is enough to interfere with
18:11
Speaker 1: the operation of a supersensitive ear. Right, that's what a
18:15
Speaker 1: telescope is, it's a super sensitive ear. And so they
18:18
Speaker 1: correlated this to when those guys were going on break
18:21
Speaker 1: and they verified it, like went over to the marcro
18:23
Speaker 1: wave and tried it, and they could tell that that's
18:26
Speaker 1: what was creating some of those signatures. So it was
18:28
Speaker 1: picking up the actual microwaves coming from the oven or
18:32
Speaker 1: just like the act of shutting down the microwave emittor
18:37
Speaker 1: in their oven when you open the door. That's somehow creates,
18:41
Speaker 1: you know, amidst radiation in this weird frequency, there's a
18:44
Speaker 1: little bit of microwave energy that actually escaped. Yeah, and
18:48
Speaker 1: if you wait for the to ding in the microwave
18:50
Speaker 1: turned off before you opened it, then none of it escaped.
18:53
Speaker 1: But if you just yanked the door open before it
18:55
Speaker 1: was finished, and this little blip would sneak out. Um,
18:59
Speaker 1: and that's what caused some of these fake astronomical signals.
19:03
Speaker 1: So my microwave operates at at the same radio frequency,
19:07
Speaker 1: says radio, it's enough to interfere. Yeah, exactly. Um. The
19:11
Speaker 1: frequency spectrums overlap a little bit. And it was hard
19:14
Speaker 1: to pin down because you know, sometimes the staff would
19:17
Speaker 1: let the microwave ding in other times they were a
19:19
Speaker 1: little more impatient and they would yank it open. So
19:21
Speaker 1: it wasn't like every single day at six pm, it
19:24
Speaker 1: was like that one guy or the one woman just
19:28
Speaker 1: you know Bob or Sally, that just the impatient, impatient
19:31
Speaker 1: one in the staff that just um was making all
19:35
Speaker 1: this funs for everybody. Yeah, exactly. I remember when this
19:38
Speaker 1: paper came out, it was like two thousand fifteen. The
19:40
Speaker 1: paper came out when they identified the source of these
19:42
Speaker 1: things as literally like microwave background. And you know, because
19:46
Speaker 1: we have this other thing in physics called the cosmic
19:49
Speaker 1: microwave background. There were a lot of jokes about Australian
19:53
Speaker 1: microwave background versus cosmic microwave background, like this is literally
19:57
Speaker 1: a background due to microwaves in Australia. They actually polished this.
20:02
Speaker 1: They said, we had a bunch of signals, but it
20:04
Speaker 1: turned out to be bob in with the microwave exactly. No,
20:07
Speaker 1: it's a hilarious paper, um, and you know, it's a
20:11
Speaker 1: nice piece of work. You know, you understand you've got
20:13
Speaker 1: to really dig into your your signals sometime and understand
20:16
Speaker 1: where they come from. And the folks, for example, a ligo,
20:19
Speaker 1: the ones looking for gravitational waves, they do similar sort
20:21
Speaker 1: of stuff. They have to understand like traffic paths, the
20:25
Speaker 1: microwave too early. Yeah, well, everything affects them. They're looking
20:28
Speaker 1: for tiny little shakes, so they have to understand like, oh,
20:31
Speaker 1: at this time of day, big trucks tend to roll
20:33
Speaker 1: by and that shakes it in this certain way and
20:35
Speaker 1: blah blah slams the door nearby two miles away. They're
20:39
Speaker 1: super sensitive, so they have to catalog all the sources
20:42
Speaker 1: of noise before they can identify something as a signal.
20:45
Speaker 1: So in the same way you see a weird signal
20:47
Speaker 1: on your day that you gotta try to rule out,
20:49
Speaker 1: you know, prosaic explanations, and this was one. And so
20:53
Speaker 1: until they did that, people didn't really believe that fast
20:57
Speaker 1: radio bursts might actually be an astronomical thing because this explanation.
21:01
Speaker 1: But once they isolated this explanation, they ought to remove those.
21:04
Speaker 1: They could tell which ones came from microwave ovens and
21:07
Speaker 1: which ones didn't. Then people started to believe, Okay, maybe
21:11
Speaker 1: these other ones you know from other observatories, um, actually
21:15
Speaker 1: are something astronomical. You mean the ones that were found
21:18
Speaker 1: by the undergrad or do people find other ones? The
21:22
Speaker 1: one found by the undergrad people now thinks is believable.
21:25
Speaker 1: And people have been combing through data and they found, um,
21:28
Speaker 1: just under a hundred other examples of mysterious fasts. Yeah, exactly.
21:35
Speaker 1: And now that we've removed you know, Bob's microwave usage
21:38
Speaker 1: is an explanation for some of them, Um, we can
21:40
Speaker 1: start to believe that these really do come from space.
21:43
Speaker 1: All right, So Bob's Bob did something good. Bob delayed
21:48
Speaker 1: the understanding of radio bursts for at least five years,
21:51
Speaker 1: so I'm not sure you can give them any positive
21:53
Speaker 1: points for that. By creating an artifice, it kind of
21:56
Speaker 1: sharpened scientists ears, so now they can sort of tell
21:59
Speaker 1: when something is artificial or not. And so now maybe
22:02
Speaker 1: you have more confidence that the ones you've seen are
22:05
Speaker 1: actually mysterious radio births from space. Yeah, I'm amazed at
22:09
Speaker 1: your ability to spin that into a positive story. Yes,
22:12
Speaker 1: nicely done. Well, Bob, slip me a hundred. Put in
22:16
Speaker 1: a good word for her. Bob or Bob's sister. Whoever
22:20
Speaker 1: did this needs a serious reputation rehabilitation program. No, but
22:25
Speaker 1: since then, we've identified something on the order of a
22:27
Speaker 1: hundred or just less of these examples in data from
22:30
Speaker 1: around the world. All right, well, let's get into what
22:32
Speaker 1: could be making these mysterious radio bursts and whether or
22:37
Speaker 1: not you should wait for the ding in your microwave.
22:40
Speaker 1: But first, let's take a quick break. All right, Daniel,
22:55
Speaker 1: So what can make these mysterious fast radio burbs? We
22:59
Speaker 1: were hearing them from space. We're pretty sure it's not
23:01
Speaker 1: Bob with the microwave accidentally causing this noise. Um, So
23:05
Speaker 1: something must have caused these one hundred weird signals that
23:09
Speaker 1: we've seen something or someone. Right, that's always the question.
23:15
Speaker 1: You know what you do in astronomy, I I guess
23:17
Speaker 1: not being an astronomer. Is you like, you see some
23:19
Speaker 1: new weird signal and then you look through your category,
23:22
Speaker 1: your you look through your catalog of stuff in the
23:24
Speaker 1: universe and ask could this make that noise? Could this
23:28
Speaker 1: make that noise? And there's nothing out there that we
23:31
Speaker 1: know of, And there's a lot of crazy stuff out
23:33
Speaker 1: there making all sorts of strange signals, but none of
23:36
Speaker 1: the things that we are aware of can make this
23:38
Speaker 1: kind of pulse. What do you mean nothing you're aware of?
23:40
Speaker 1: Like doesn't the Sun make radiation and radaways? Or you
23:45
Speaker 1: know what I mean, Like, how do you know that
23:47
Speaker 1: the Sun isn't making these births? Yeah, well they're not
23:49
Speaker 1: coming from the direction of the sun right there. Coming
23:52
Speaker 1: they come from all over the sky. And if you ask,
23:54
Speaker 1: like where do they come from? In general, they don't
23:57
Speaker 1: even come in general from the direction of the Milky Way.
24:00
Speaker 1: Like if there was something from our galaxy, then you
24:03
Speaker 1: expected to come from something sort of in the plane
24:05
Speaker 1: of the Milky Way. You know that band of scot
24:08
Speaker 1: of stars you see like dribbled across the sky. If
24:11
Speaker 1: it's something from our galaxy, some like weird kind of
24:13
Speaker 1: star in our galaxy, you'd expect to see it more
24:16
Speaker 1: in the direction in the Milky Way, but we don't.
24:18
Speaker 1: We see in all sorts of directions, which means it's
24:21
Speaker 1: most likely coming from outside our galaxy. They're definitely not
24:25
Speaker 1: all coming from the Sun. That's be easy to figure out.
24:27
Speaker 1: You know that they're not coming from our galaxies. So
24:29
Speaker 1: it must be something super far away, which means at
24:33
Speaker 1: the origin it must be like a super powerful burst
24:36
Speaker 1: to be able to hear something. To be able to
24:38
Speaker 1: see a signal from so far away means that it
24:42
Speaker 1: has to be incredibly intense that its source. Remember these
24:46
Speaker 1: other galaxies, I mean, our galaxy is huge, rights a
24:48
Speaker 1: hundred thousand light years across, but these other galaxies there
24:52
Speaker 1: are millions of light years away. And you know, if
24:55
Speaker 1: we send a signal to those galaxies, even if we
24:57
Speaker 1: directed it, it would be pretty pretty hard for any
25:00
Speaker 1: ready to hear it, because these signals dropped by one
25:03
Speaker 1: over the distance squared, So you go twice as far
25:06
Speaker 1: the signal is four times as quiet. You go a
25:09
Speaker 1: thousand times as far right, and the signals a million
25:12
Speaker 1: times quieter. So to be able to hear it from
25:15
Speaker 1: so far away exactly means that at the source that
25:17
Speaker 1: has to be crazy intense, and we also just don't
25:21
Speaker 1: know anything crazy intense and very brief sort of sad
25:25
Speaker 1: trombone sounds. What do you mean is a sad trombone? Well,
25:29
Speaker 1: if you look at the frequencies, the frequency sort of shift.
25:31
Speaker 1: It's not like a single frequency. It starts off at
25:34
Speaker 1: a higher frequency and then it drops quickly to a
25:37
Speaker 1: lower frequency. So it sort of sounds like a sad trombone,
25:40
Speaker 1: and you know, like a warm Oh I see. So
25:46
Speaker 1: maybe it's just the universe providing a soundtrack to my
25:50
Speaker 1: to my comedy. Every time you make a bad joke,
25:53
Speaker 1: we hear a fast radio burst. We'd be hearing a
25:56
Speaker 1: lot more of them, That's all I gotta say. Right,
25:59
Speaker 1: every time I say a joke, you know, got up there,
26:01
Speaker 1: it hits the button and the audience gets a little world. Yeah. So,
26:08
Speaker 1: so how powerful are these then? Well, we're not exactly sure.
26:11
Speaker 1: Some of them we've located, like a few of them
26:13
Speaker 1: have repeated, so we've been able to like spot exactly
26:16
Speaker 1: where they're coming from because it came because we've heard
26:18
Speaker 1: them more than once. Um. But estimates are that they
26:21
Speaker 1: have as much energy in just one of these pulses
26:25
Speaker 1: as our sun puts out in eighty years of learning. Right,
26:29
Speaker 1: So it's frying you, it's causing summer, it's you know,
26:32
Speaker 1: toasting mercury. All that energy put out by the Sun
26:35
Speaker 1: over eighty years. Concentrate that into a few milliseconds. That's
26:40
Speaker 1: the amount of energy we're talking about. If what we're
26:42
Speaker 1: hearing is coming from another galaxy, then that's how powerful
26:46
Speaker 1: it must be. When it happens, it must be like
26:49
Speaker 1: some kind of explosion or some big event. It's definitely
26:52
Speaker 1: some kind of big event. And you know, we don't
26:54
Speaker 1: have a whole lot of data because we only have,
26:56
Speaker 1: like you know, less than a hundred examples, and each
26:58
Speaker 1: one is really brief. You don't have a lot of
27:01
Speaker 1: information on each one. It's not like you have a long,
27:04
Speaker 1: extended tail you can study. But we can do really
27:06
Speaker 1: clever tricks. We can like ask, like, you know, what's
27:09
Speaker 1: the arrival time and this frequency versus the other frequency,
27:13
Speaker 1: and we can use that to think about like how
27:15
Speaker 1: it propagates through the universe because different kinds of stuff
27:19
Speaker 1: in the universe allow different frequency signals to propagate at
27:23
Speaker 1: different speeds or block them or whatever. So we have
27:25
Speaker 1: these things. It's called the dispersion measure that tells us
27:27
Speaker 1: like how spread out is the signal. And all these
27:30
Speaker 1: things are totally consistent with a really small source, really
27:35
Speaker 1: really really far away source, meaning that the thing that
27:39
Speaker 1: makes these can't be really big. It's not like an
27:42
Speaker 1: entire galaxy is emitting this thing. It's something that's like
27:45
Speaker 1: a few hundred kilometers across. Wait, how do we know this?
27:49
Speaker 1: Because of the way there's sort of the shape of
27:50
Speaker 1: a pulse. Right. First of all, it's really really short, right,
27:53
Speaker 1: So if you have some huge object that's creating a
27:57
Speaker 1: signal and it's really enormous, then you're gonna hear a
28:00
Speaker 1: longer signal just because if it comes from the back
28:03
Speaker 1: of it, you'll take longer to get to you, right.
28:06
Speaker 1: But if it comes from a tiny little source like
28:09
Speaker 1: a point or something like a meter across, then it's
28:12
Speaker 1: possible to create a really really tight signal. And so
28:15
Speaker 1: because this thing only lasts a millisecond, then you can
28:19
Speaker 1: give us a sense like a rough and order magnitude
28:21
Speaker 1: estimate for the size of the object that's making it.
28:24
Speaker 1: Something really big makes a really big pulse, then you know,
28:29
Speaker 1: just the physics of it wouldn't allow it to create
28:32
Speaker 1: something so sharp. Yeah, exactly, you need something really small
28:36
Speaker 1: to create a really sharp signature. And you know, this
28:39
Speaker 1: is the kind of thing we do in physics. Were like,
28:41
Speaker 1: let's squeeze as much information as we can out of
28:43
Speaker 1: this tiny little bit of data. And so that's what
28:47
Speaker 1: we know. It's something super far away, kind of small
28:50
Speaker 1: and really intense, and there's just nothing in our catalog
28:54
Speaker 1: of knowledge that's capable of producing that. Let's jump right
28:57
Speaker 1: into what could it be? Aliens? You know, aliens are
29:00
Speaker 1: on the top of my list for I think you
29:05
Speaker 1: always put any at the top of your list, Daniel. So, no,
29:08
Speaker 1: astrophysics are very creative bunch. And so what they do
29:12
Speaker 1: when they're sitting in front of this kind of mystery
29:14
Speaker 1: is they try to get creative and they say, well,
29:16
Speaker 1: but if we take something which is capable of creating
29:18
Speaker 1: radio waves and it's really intensely powerful, like a magnetar.
29:23
Speaker 1: Remember what a magnetar is. It's a super category of
29:26
Speaker 1: neutron star, right, A neutron star. That's different than a minotaur, right,
29:32
Speaker 1: that's right, it's it's at the center of the maze. No,
29:35
Speaker 1: it's a pulsar that's super duper powerful and has a
29:39
Speaker 1: crazy magnetic field. And they're looking at thinks that have
29:42
Speaker 1: a lot of magnetic fields because this is e M radiation.
29:45
Speaker 1: So they're thinking maybe it's some like weird twist in
29:48
Speaker 1: a magnetic field that the magnetic field buckles and shocks
29:51
Speaker 1: or whatever, and that creates these pulses. And so one
29:56
Speaker 1: category of ideas is like, maybe it's like a an
30:00
Speaker 1: earthquake on the surface of a magnetar that creates like
30:04
Speaker 1: a little burst of energy, a little shock wave of energy. Yeah.
30:08
Speaker 1: And even that's not a quake on the surface of
30:11
Speaker 1: a star, yeah, starquakes, right, that sounds like an awesome
30:16
Speaker 1: science fiction novel starquake, Yeah. Yeah. And so they call
30:20
Speaker 1: these things hyper flares when a magnetard just like bursts
30:23
Speaker 1: out a big explosion of energy. But even those hyper
30:26
Speaker 1: cracks somehow, yeah, you know, like a yeah, like it
30:31
Speaker 1: cracks or like it it um. Yeah, We'll think about
30:34
Speaker 1: what happens in an earthquake exactly. These the plates rub
30:37
Speaker 1: up against each other and you get a release of energy.
30:40
Speaker 1: So it's not an exact analogy to what's happening on
30:42
Speaker 1: the surface of this magnetard and another galaxy, but it's
30:45
Speaker 1: it's similar. And even that, the calculation suggest is not
30:48
Speaker 1: enough to power these things. So now they're thinking about,
30:51
Speaker 1: like what happens and then maybe another one follows it,
30:54
Speaker 1: and the two interfere in this way that gives this
30:57
Speaker 1: first one a boost. I mean they're having a really,
31:00
Speaker 1: really reached to the bottom of the barrel here to
31:02
Speaker 1: come up with explanations for what might explain these things.
31:05
Speaker 1: And there are other models as models, like maybe it's
31:08
Speaker 1: some strange thing it happens when a black hole eats
31:10
Speaker 1: a neutron star, although by now we've seen a few
31:13
Speaker 1: of those with our gravitational wave detectors, and they don't
31:16
Speaker 1: always come with fast radio bursts, so I think that
31:19
Speaker 1: explanation is is not as popular. But the signals from
31:23
Speaker 1: the gravitational waves are sort of similar, aren't they. And
31:26
Speaker 1: aren't they also like a sad trombone and also really short? Yeah,
31:29
Speaker 1: but they have a sort of a ringdown effect. They're
31:31
Speaker 1: like a wan wan wan wan wan wan wan um,
31:38
Speaker 1: And I think they're longer than just a few milliseconds.
31:41
Speaker 1: But actually I don't remember the details. Another explanation, which
31:44
Speaker 1: I love only because the name is awesome, is that
31:47
Speaker 1: people think it might be this kind of star called
31:50
Speaker 1: a blitz Are. Blitz Are, Yeah, blitz Are is named
31:54
Speaker 1: after Yeah, of course, you know you're in the situation
31:59
Speaker 1: room and you gotta come up with an explanation, and
32:01
Speaker 1: so you reach with the blitzer and and your beard
32:03
Speaker 1: just radiates energy. And they called it the blitzer. That's right,
32:07
Speaker 1: And that's going to be the plot for the next
32:09
Speaker 1: movie with Vin Diesel and Wolf Blitzer. Right there, you
32:13
Speaker 1: go fasten the blitze part. Blitz Are is a special
32:18
Speaker 1: kind of pulse are that sometimes collapses and turns into
32:21
Speaker 1: a black hole. And I don't know why they called
32:23
Speaker 1: it a blitz are, but they think that maybe when
32:27
Speaker 1: that happens, perhaps it releases this kind of energy. But
32:30
Speaker 1: you know, people are really stretching when it's becoming a
32:32
Speaker 1: black hole. It cries out one less blitz yeah, exactly.
32:36
Speaker 1: It's like it's maybe that's where it comes from. It's
32:38
Speaker 1: the death rattle of a pulsar. Perhaps, all right, but
32:40
Speaker 1: that's just one possibility. Another possibility, and what else could
32:45
Speaker 1: it be. Well, there are other crazy ideas, like maybe
32:47
Speaker 1: it's some strange quantum mechanical effect. You know, there are
32:51
Speaker 1: really weird quantum mechanical things that happen in every star,
32:54
Speaker 1: Like you know, how does light get from the inside
32:57
Speaker 1: of a star out into the universe? Right? That requires
33:01
Speaker 1: quantum mechanical things like tunneling, which we talked about in
33:03
Speaker 1: another podcast episode. And so some people have come up
33:06
Speaker 1: with a strange quantum mechanical entanglement effect called super radiance
33:11
Speaker 1: when a big blob of the star sort of gets
33:13
Speaker 1: entangled and and this could happen like if you're really
33:16
Speaker 1: close to the center of a galaxy, and when a
33:19
Speaker 1: big blob of stuff becomes sort of quantum mechanical on
33:22
Speaker 1: a macroscopic scale, that they can do things that the
33:25
Speaker 1: individual blob not can't necessarily. And one of the ideas
33:29
Speaker 1: is this super radiance that they can admit a huge
33:32
Speaker 1: pulsive energy all at once. But this is really one
33:35
Speaker 1: of the more fringe theories. Wait, the idea is that
33:37
Speaker 1: the whole sun, the whole star sort of becomes quantum
33:42
Speaker 1: synchronized or something. And the idea and not the whole
33:45
Speaker 1: star that that would be cool, but sort of a
33:47
Speaker 1: large blob of it um, you know, and the large
33:50
Speaker 1: blob is a hundred kilometers or something, so that would
33:53
Speaker 1: be pretty awesome. We do sort of similar experiments on Earth.
33:56
Speaker 1: It's related Bose Einstein condensates our materials, where a bud
34:00
Speaker 1: just stuff has the same quantum state, and so that
34:02
Speaker 1: has a macroscopy of properties. But that those are usually
34:06
Speaker 1: super tiny, aren't they aren't they um like the size
34:09
Speaker 1: of a of a few atoms or something. Yeah, we've
34:12
Speaker 1: never succeeded in building one that's you know, that's really macroscopic.
34:17
Speaker 1: That's like, you know, meters wide for sure. No, we
34:20
Speaker 1: never never achieved that. But there is a relationship between
34:23
Speaker 1: that kind of thing and these sort of super radiance effects.
34:26
Speaker 1: But it's all this is all just speculation. And the
34:30
Speaker 1: thing I love about this is we have the data. Right,
34:32
Speaker 1: This is not just people sitting around thinking, maybe this
34:35
Speaker 1: happens inside of stars, maybe this thing, let's give this
34:39
Speaker 1: thing this funny name. Here, we're trying to explain something real, right.
34:43
Speaker 1: The universe is telling us there's this new weird thing
34:46
Speaker 1: out there you do not know about. And it's a clue, right,
34:50
Speaker 1: it's a clue that we have to unravel, and in
34:52
Speaker 1: decades to come, somebody will understand what causes these things.
34:55
Speaker 1: And it could be something new and amazing and crazy,
34:58
Speaker 1: or it could just be like, oh, some new phase
35:01
Speaker 1: of the life of a neutron star. And you're pretty
35:03
Speaker 1: sure it's not Bob with the microwave down in the kitchen. Look,
35:06
Speaker 1: Bob has been fired, okay, so he's not creating a
35:09
Speaker 1: more problem with me. He went to work somewhere else,
35:11
Speaker 1: or she went to work somewhere else. No, they're much
35:14
Speaker 1: more careful now with the microt waves at radio astronomy facilities.
35:18
Speaker 1: But though that is one of the funnest papers I've
35:20
Speaker 1: ever read. Now they've ruled out, But it could be
35:23
Speaker 1: it could be an alien, an alien Bob somewhere else
35:26
Speaker 1: in the universe opening it's giant, super radiant Blitzer star
35:33
Speaker 1: early too early before the day, causing these things. You know,
35:37
Speaker 1: I've never heard that explanation. I think you might have
35:40
Speaker 1: solved this right here live on the podcast. Or you're
35:43
Speaker 1: going Nobel prize plate please, Yeah, the Nobel prize for
35:48
Speaker 1: that one is just a bag of popcorn. Actually, what
35:50
Speaker 1: it was my undergrad who came up with that explanation,
35:52
Speaker 1: but I am taking all the credit. At least share
35:55
Speaker 1: the popcorn with him, will you? All right? So that's uh,
35:58
Speaker 1: yet another incredible mr you out there in the universe
36:01
Speaker 1: that we are pretty sure is there, but we can't
36:03
Speaker 1: explain what is causing you. That's right, The universe is
36:07
Speaker 1: telling us here's a clue, there's something weird. You don't understand,
36:11
Speaker 1: figure it out, and it's We're only a decade in
36:14
Speaker 1: and we still basically have no idea what this thing is.
36:17
Speaker 1: So the next time you reheat something in your microwave,
36:20
Speaker 1: for the love of science, please wait for it to
36:23
Speaker 1: ding all of science. Thanks you for your patients. If
36:35
Speaker 1: you still have a question after listening to all these explanations,
36:38
Speaker 1: please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you.
36:41
Speaker 1: You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at
36:44
Speaker 1: Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at
36:47
Speaker 1: Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening,
36:51
Speaker 1: and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
36:54
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from
36:57
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37:01
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