Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomy podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome back to the show we are. We're
Speaker 2: absolutely thrilled to have you with us today because we
Speaker 2: are looking up, way, way up exactly. We're turning our
Speaker 2: gaze toward one of the most baffling, high energy mysteries
Speaker 2: in the well, in the entire known universe. We're talking
Speaker 2: about a phenomenon that has basically been taunting astronomers for
Speaker 2: what nearly two decades now.
Speaker 3: It really has. I mean, it's one of those cosmic
Speaker 3: puzzles that just you know, refuses to fit into the box.
Speaker 3: It has kept a lot of very smart people awake
Speaker 3: at night, just staring at data screens.
Speaker 2: We're talking, of course, about fast radio.
Speaker 3: Bursts or frb's for sure.
Speaker 2: I've always loved that name, Fast radio bursts. Yeah, it
Speaker 2: just sounds so urgent, it sounds like a warning, and
Speaker 2: the description it really matches the name, right. These are
Speaker 2: essentially cosmic flickers.
Speaker 3: Flicker is a good word, but it almost understates the
Speaker 3: violence of it. These are millisecond long flashes of radio waves.
Speaker 3: They appear out of nowhere. They just scream across the
Speaker 3: cosmos with this incredible brightness.
Speaker 2: And when you say incredible, you mean.
Speaker 3: I mean releasing as much energy in a fraction of
Speaker 3: a second as our sun does in days or weeks,
Speaker 3: or for some of them, even a century.
Speaker 2: A century's worth of solar energy in a millisecond, and
Speaker 2: then lah, they're gone.
Speaker 3: Silence.
Speaker 2: That is the part that gets me every time we
Speaker 2: discuss this topic, the sheer scale of the energy versus
Speaker 2: the brevity of the event. It's like a camera flash
Speaker 2: that blinds you from across the room m m, but
Speaker 2: the camera is actually located in another galaxy entirely.
Speaker 3: That is a fantastic way to visualize it. And because
Speaker 3: they're so bright and so short, for the longest time,
Speaker 3: the big question, the obsession really has been what is
Speaker 3: the engine driving these things? What kind of cosmic beast
Speaker 3: has the power to scream that loud that fast?
Speaker 2: Right, It's the classic celestial Who do unit are they?
Speaker 2: You know, lonely isolated stars just screaming into the void.
Speaker 3: Is it a cataclysmic explosion where something is being destroyed
Speaker 3: or is.
Speaker 2: There something more complex, maybe even more structural, going on.
Speaker 3: It has been a massive open question in astrophysics for
Speaker 3: a long time. There were more theories than there were
Speaker 3: observed bursts.
Speaker 2: But that's changing, and that's why we're here today. We're
Speaker 2: unpacking a major, major break in the.
Speaker 3: Case we are And this isn't just a theory or
Speaker 3: some computer simulation running in a basement somewhere. This is well,
Speaker 3: the paper calls it decisive evidence, Okay, published just recently
Speaker 3: on January sixteenth, twenty twenty six, in the journal Science.
Speaker 2: And this comes from a huge international team.
Speaker 3: Right, a massive collaboration, yeah, including researchers from the University
Speaker 3: of Hong Kong or HKU. And the headline is just
Speaker 3: it's astonishing at least some of these FRB sources, they're
Speaker 3: not living the single life.
Speaker 2: They are in relationships. I like that. Even stars need
Speaker 2: a plus one exactly.
Speaker 3: They are in binary stellar systems. They have companions, and
Speaker 3: that well a lot changes everything about how we understand them.
Speaker 2: So today we are starting a full investigation. We're going
Speaker 2: to unpack this discovery piece by piece. We're going to
Speaker 2: meet the detective in this story, a massive telescope called
Speaker 2: the China Sky.
Speaker 3: I, and we'll look at the subject, a specific repeating
Speaker 3: burse source known as FRB two two zero five and
Speaker 3: two nine A.
Speaker 2: And we're going to talk about a smoking gun event,
Speaker 2: a little something called an RM flare. And just to
Speaker 2: give you a roadnap, this isn't just about finding a
Speaker 2: second star. It's about how a really boring observation, literally
Speaker 2: staring and nothing happening for months, suddenly turned into a
Speaker 2: discovery that might just change our understanding of the architecture
Speaker 2: of the universe.
Speaker 3: It's a great story. It's about patients, the physics of
Speaker 3: light and well stellar weather.
Speaker 2: I love stories where boredom pays off. It gives me
Speaker 2: hope for my own life. So let's set the scene.
Speaker 2: This wasn't a lucky snapshot, was it. This wasn't someone
Speaker 2: just pointing a telescope at the sky at random and
Speaker 2: boom they get lucky.
Speaker 3: This is a scakeout, oh precisely. This is a long term,
Speaker 3: calculated stakeout. And to understand why this is so special
Speaker 3: and why we haven't found this before. We have to
Speaker 3: talk about the tool they used, the Fast telescope.
Speaker 2: Fast FAST that stands for the five hundred meter aperture spherical.
Speaker 3: Telescope located in Guzu, China. It's the world's largest filled
Speaker 3: aperture radio telescope. When we say China Sky, we aren't kidding.
Speaker 3: The scale of this thing is. It's just hard to wrap.
Speaker 2: Your head around five hundred meters across. If you filled
Speaker 2: that dish with water, you're not talking about a pool,
Speaker 2: you're talking about a lake.
Speaker 3: You could fit entire neighborhoods inside the dish. And in
Speaker 3: radio astronomy, size is everything.
Speaker 2: Size matters, it really does.
Speaker 3: The larger the dish, the more radio waves you can catch.
Speaker 3: It's like having a bigger bucket in.
Speaker 2: The rain, right, a bigger bucket catches more.
Speaker 3: In this case, the drops are these incredibly faint radio
Speaker 3: signals from billions of light years away. The sensitivity of
Speaker 3: Fast is what makes this kind of detailed monitoring even possible.
Speaker 3: It can hear whispers that other telescopes might miss entirely.
Speaker 2: So they've got this massive ear listening to the sky
Speaker 2: and they didn't just listen to static. They pointed this
Speaker 2: massive ear at a very very specific.
Speaker 3: Target FRB two two zero five two nine.
Speaker 2: A, which I have to say sounds like a license plate.
Speaker 3: It does. It's not the most poetic man. Astronomers are
Speaker 3: great at math, not always great at branding. Yeah, but
Speaker 3: that license plate represents an active repeating source and it's
Speaker 3: located about two point five billion light years away.
Speaker 2: Okay, before we go any further, let's pause on that
Speaker 2: word repeating, because that is a crucial distinction in this field,
Speaker 2: isn't it.
Speaker 3: It's everything.
Speaker 2: My understanding is that most of these fast radio bursts
Speaker 2: they happen once and then they never happen again.
Speaker 3: That's right. The vast majority of FOI we've ever detected
Speaker 3: are one offs, a flash, and then silence forever from
Speaker 3: that spot in the sky.
Speaker 2: And those must be incredibly hard to study.
Speaker 3: Oh they're a nightmare because you can't predict them. You
Speaker 3: don't know where to look until it's already over. It's
Speaker 3: like trying to study a lightning bolt without knowing where
Speaker 3: the storm is, or trying.
Speaker 2: To study a car crash after the tow truck has
Speaker 2: already left.
Speaker 3: That's a great way to put it. But a repeater
Speaker 3: is different.
Speaker 2: A repeater is a gift.
Speaker 3: It is a gift. It flashes again and again. It
Speaker 3: gives you a specific address in the sky to focus on.
Speaker 3: It says hey, I'm over here, keep watching.
Speaker 2: Which means you can keep the camera rolling, so to speak.
Speaker 3: Exactly. Repeaters allow for long term monitoring. You can watch
Speaker 3: them over time to see if anything in their environment changes.
Speaker 3: You can track their behavior, their patterns. And that is
Speaker 3: exactly what the FRB Key Science Program has been doing
Speaker 3: since twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: And this program was co led by Professor Bingzhang, the
Speaker 2: chair Professor of Astrophysics.
Speaker 3: At HKU CORRECT and they decided to keep a very
Speaker 3: close watch on this one specific source FRB two two
Speaker 3: zero five two nine A.
Speaker 2: And this is where the human element comes in, the patience.
Speaker 3: Here is where the patien's part of science really comes
Speaker 3: into play. I think people often imagine science as these
Speaker 3: constant Eureka moments happening every day in the.
Speaker 2: Lab, right the flashing light bulbs over people's heads.
Speaker 3: But often it just looks like monotony. For seventeen months
Speaker 3: they watched this source.
Speaker 2: Seventeen months is almost a year and a half of
Speaker 2: just staring.
Speaker 3: And for seventeen months, the data appeared well, unremarkable, unremarkable,
Speaker 3: just doing its normal thing, blinking occasionally, standard repeating FRB behavior.
Speaker 3: The signal looked clean, consistent, and frankly a bit boring.
Speaker 2: I can just imagine the researchers checking the data every morning.
Speaker 2: Anything new, Nope, anything weird, nope, just seventeen months of
Speaker 2: steady as she goes. I mean, why keep looking? If
Speaker 2: I stared at a wall for seventeen months and it
Speaker 2: didn't move, I would probably stop staring.
Speaker 3: Well, you need that baseline. That's the key. If you
Speaker 3: don't know what normal looks like, you can't possibly recognize abnormal.
Speaker 3: Ah okay, you have to know the resting heartbeat of
Speaker 3: the system before you can diagnose in arrhythmia. You need
Speaker 3: the control group.
Speaker 2: That's a fair point. You can't spot the anomaly if
Speaker 2: you don't know the pattern exactly.
Speaker 3: And then near the end of twenty twenty three, the
Speaker 3: boredom broke.
Speaker 2: The turning point, the exciting part.
Speaker 3: The data suddenly spiked. Something changed drastically in the signal
Speaker 3: they were receiving.
Speaker 2: Okay, so let's unpack that change, because this is where
Speaker 2: we get into the real physics of the discovery. Yeah,
Speaker 2: this wasn't just the signal got louder right, It wasn't
Speaker 2: just a volume knob being turned up.
Speaker 3: No, not at all. It was about the quality of
Speaker 3: the light, specifically something called polarization.
Speaker 2: Polarization. Okay, I think most of us have heard that word,
Speaker 2: probably in the context of what sunglasses we do.
Speaker 3: That's the perfect daily life analogy. Think about light from
Speaker 3: the sun or a light bulb. Usually, the light waves
Speaker 3: are vibrating in all directions at once, up and down,
Speaker 3: left and right, diagonally. It's a chaotic jumble of vibration,
Speaker 3: like a crowd.
Speaker 2: Of people walking in every direction at a busy intersection.
Speaker 3: Perfect but polarized light is disciplined. All the waves are
Speaker 3: vibrating in the same plane. Imagine shaking a rope. If
Speaker 3: you shake it up and down, the wave is vertical.
Speaker 3: If you shake it side to side, the wave is horizontal.
Speaker 3: That's polarization.
Speaker 2: And these FRBs have what nearly perfect polarization.
Speaker 3: Near one hundred percent linear polarization. So it's like someone
Speaker 3: is shaking a rope across the universe in a very
Speaker 3: specific direction. It's an incredibly pure signal and polarized sunglasses.
Speaker 2: They work by blocking the waves that aren't lined.
Speaker 3: Up correctly exactly. They act like a tiny picket fence.
Speaker 3: If you shake that rope up and down, it can
Speaker 3: pass through the vertical slats of the.
Speaker 2: Fence, but if you shake it side to side, the.
Speaker 3: Fence stops it. That's how they cut down on glare.
Speaker 2: Okay, So we have these perfectly oriented waves. Let's just
Speaker 2: say they're vibrating up and down and they're traveling through
Speaker 2: space for two point five billion years. They're headed toward Earth.
Speaker 2: What happens to them.
Speaker 3: On the way, Well, space isn't perfectly empty, especially not
Speaker 3: the space right around the source of the burst. As
Speaker 3: these radio waves travel, they might pass through what we
Speaker 3: call magnetized plasma.
Speaker 2: Magnetized plasma. That sounds like something from a sci fi weapon.
Speaker 3: It sounds exotic, but it's actually one of the most
Speaker 3: common things in the universe. Plasma is just a gas
Speaker 3: that's been superheated until the electrons are ripped off the atoms.
Speaker 3: It's a hot charge soup, okay, And magnetize just means
Speaker 3: there's a magnetic field running through it.
Speaker 2: So we have our rope wave traveling through this hot
Speaker 2: magnetic soup. What does the soup do to the rope?
Speaker 3: It twists it, It twists it, it rotates the angle
Speaker 3: of the vibration. This effect is called Ferritaday rotation. So
Speaker 3: if the waves started out vibrating up and down, after
Speaker 3: passing through the magnetized plasma, it might be vibrating diagonally
Speaker 3: or even completely side to side by the time it
Speaker 3: gets to us.
Speaker 2: So the plasma literally grabs the wave and physically spins
Speaker 2: the orientation.
Speaker 3: That's a great way to think of it. And the
Speaker 3: more dense the plasma is, or the stronger the magnetic field,
Speaker 3: the more it twists. And we can measure that twist.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: We use a metric called the rotation measure, or RM
Speaker 3: for short.
Speaker 2: So the RM is basically a number that tells you
Speaker 2: how much has this signal been twisted by the stuff
Speaker 2: it flew through to get to us.
Speaker 3: That is a perfect summary. The higher the RM number,
Speaker 3: the more stuff it flew through, or the more magnetic
Speaker 3: that stuff was.
Speaker 2: Okay, so let's go back to our stakeout. We have
Speaker 2: seventeen months of data from FAST.
Speaker 3: And during the seventeen months the rotation measure, that amount
Speaker 3: of twist was pretty constant. It had a steady low value.
Speaker 2: Which tells us the environment around the FRB was.
Speaker 3: Stable, very stable. The light was passing through the same
Speaker 3: amount of stuff every single day. Normal, boring, predictable.
Speaker 2: And then came late twenty twenty.
Speaker 3: Three entered doctor Ye Lee from the Purple Mountain Observatory.
Speaker 3: Doctor Lee was analyzing the data and noted an abrupt,
Speaker 3: massive increase in the rotation measure.
Speaker 2: How massive very time? Did it? Double?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it increased by more than a factor of one hundred.
Speaker 2: WHOA Okay, that is not a blip, that's not a
Speaker 2: measurement error. That is a fundamental distortion.
Speaker 3: It was a massive distortion. The signal was being twisted
Speaker 3: wildly compared to what they had seen for the last
Speaker 3: year and a half. And here's the key piece of evidence.
Speaker 3: This spike didn't stay forever. It rapidly declined and returned
Speaker 3: to normal over a period of just two weeks.
Speaker 2: So seventeen months of normal, two weeks of extreme twisting,
Speaker 2: and then right back normal.
Speaker 3: The team dubbed this event an RM flare.
Speaker 2: An RM flare, it sounds dramatic, so let's put on
Speaker 2: our detective hats here. If the twist comes from passing
Speaker 2: through plasma. Then a sudden, massive increase in the twist
Speaker 2: means that a very dense, very magnetized plasma suddenly crossed
Speaker 2: the line of sight between Earth and the FRB.
Speaker 3: That's the only logical conclusion.
Speaker 2: We like analogies, So is this like Imagine we're looking
Speaker 2: at a flashlight being that's the FRB, and for seventeen months,
Speaker 2: the air between us and.
Speaker 3: The flashlight is clear, perfectly clear, and.
Speaker 2: Then suddenly a thick cloud of smoke blows right across
Speaker 2: the beam.
Speaker 3: That is a great analogy. The smoke would distort the
Speaker 3: light light, make it shimmer and change. In this case,
Speaker 3: the smoke is a clump of magnetized plasma, and because
Speaker 3: it only lasted two weeks, we know that this clump
Speaker 3: was moving, it crossed the path and then cleared out.
Speaker 2: So we have a smoking gun or maybe a passing
Speaker 2: cloud of plasma. But where did the plasma come from?
Speaker 2: The FRB is two point five billion light years away.
Speaker 2: We can't just send a drone to check it out.
Speaker 3: No, we have to deduce it. And this is where
Speaker 3: we move to the next phase of our investigation. Identifying
Speaker 3: the culprit connecting the dots.
Speaker 2: Okay, we have twisted radio waves, we have a temporary
Speaker 2: cloud of plasma. How do we get from that to
Speaker 2: binary star system? I mean, why couldn't it just be
Speaker 2: a random cloud floating by in deep space?
Speaker 3: It comes down to probability and physics. Deep space is
Speaker 3: actually pretty empty. The chances of a random dense cloud
Speaker 3: just happening to drift by exactly in front of this
Speaker 3: one tiny source are astronomically low. You need a source
Speaker 3: for that plasma, You need an engine that produces it nearby.
Speaker 2: You need a smoke machine to make the smoke exactly.
Speaker 3: And Professor Bingsang provided the explanation. He said, the natural
Speaker 3: explanation for a sudden plasma cloud appearing and disappearing like
Speaker 3: that is a companion star, a neighbor, a very close neighbor.
Speaker 3: Imagine the FRB source, which we're pretty sure as a
Speaker 3: magnetar and we can get to that in a minute.
Speaker 3: Just sitting there in space and right next to it,
Speaker 3: organing around it is another star, maybe something massive or
Speaker 3: maybe something more like our sun.
Speaker 2: Okay, so they're dancing around each other, a binary system,
Speaker 2: two stars locked together by gravity.
Speaker 3: And just like our son, other stars are active. They
Speaker 3: aren't just calm, glowing balls. They're volatile, they have weather.
Speaker 3: Sometimes they burp.
Speaker 2: They burp.
Speaker 3: Technically, it's called a coronal mass ejection, or a CME.
Speaker 3: You've probably heard of solar storms, oh right, We hear.
Speaker 2: About those with our own sun all the time. When
Speaker 2: the Sun spits out a huge cloud of stuff that
Speaker 2: can mess with our satellites or create the northern lights.
Speaker 3: That's the one. And that stuff it spits out is
Speaker 3: a massive clump you guessed it, magnetized plasma.
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 3: So the scenario they proposes this, the companion star launches
Speaker 3: a CME, a big blob of plasma. This blob physically
Speaker 3: moves out into space, and in this specific case, its
Speaker 3: path took it right in front of the FRB source
Speaker 3: from our perspective.
Speaker 2: So it moves right between us and the FRB exactly.
Speaker 3: It didn't block it completely, but it put a very
Speaker 3: dense magnetized filter in front of it. The radio waves
Speaker 3: from the FRB had to pass through this fresh blob
Speaker 3: of plasma to get to Earth. That causes the massive
Speaker 3: twist the RM flare.
Speaker 2: And as the blob keeps moving on its trajectory.
Speaker 3: The distortion fades, and after about two weeks, the coast
Speaker 3: is clear, the blob is moved past our line of sight,
Speaker 3: and the signal goes right back to normal.
Speaker 2: That is incredible detective work. You're watching a tiny blip
Speaker 2: of light, you see it get twisted, and from that
Speaker 2: you realize, oh, the guy standing next to him and
Speaker 2: just sneezed.
Speaker 3: That is effectively what happened, a stellar sneeze. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: the math backs it up completely.
Speaker 2: This is where Professor yuan pe Yang from U nine
Speaker 2: University comes into the picture, isn't it?
Speaker 3: Yes? Professor Yang ran the numbers. They calculated the size
Speaker 3: and the density of the plasma clump that would be
Speaker 3: required to cause that specific amount of distortion they saw,
Speaker 3: and it matched perfectly with the known properties of CMEs
Speaker 3: launched by our own sun and other stars we've studied
Speaker 3: in the Milky Way.
Speaker 2: So it fits the profile.
Speaker 3: If fits the profile perfectly, if it walks like a
Speaker 3: duck and quacks like a duck, or in this case,
Speaker 3: if it twists light exactly like a solar flare, it.
Speaker 2: Is probably a solar flare from a neighborstar. I just
Speaker 2: want to clarify something for you. The listener. Though. We
Speaker 2: didn't see this companion star, did we We didn't take
Speaker 2: an optical picture of it.
Speaker 3: No, absolutely not. At two point five billion light years,
Speaker 3: Trying to visually see a standard star sitting right next
Speaker 3: to a bright, flaring FRB source is basically impossible with
Speaker 3: current tech. It's too far and way too faint compared
Speaker 3: to the burst itself. We saw it through its.
Speaker 2: Inflow, through the mess it made exactly.
Speaker 3: It's all the plasma throughout. It's like seeing footprints up
Speaker 3: here in the snow. You don't see the person who
Speaker 3: made them, but you know for a fact someone just
Speaker 3: walked by.
Speaker 2: That's a great image. Or seeing leaves rustle in the wind.
Speaker 2: You don't see the wind, but you see its effects precisely.
Speaker 3: And we should mention this wasn't just fast working entirely
Speaker 3: alone in a vacuum. Australia's Parks telescope also contributed continuous
Speaker 3: radio observations which helped verify these findings. It was a
Speaker 3: real cross hemisphere effort.
Speaker 2: So we have the evidence, we have the culprit, a
Speaker 2: messy neighbor star. What does this mean for the big picture.
Speaker 2: Let's move to the implications here. Why does it matter
Speaker 2: so much if an FRB has a buddy.
Speaker 3: This is where it gets really fascinating for astrophysics, because
Speaker 3: this discovery helps solidify the identity of the FRB source
Speaker 3: itself engine the engine. For a long time, the leading
Speaker 3: suspect for what creates frb's has been a magnetar.
Speaker 2: A magnetar, which is arguably the most metal thing in
Speaker 2: the entire universe.
Speaker 3: It really is. A magnetar is a type of neutron star,
Speaker 3: so it's the crushed, collapsed core of a dead star,
Speaker 3: and it's incredibly dense. A single teaspoon of it would
Speaker 3: weigh a.
Speaker 2: Billion tons a billion tons.
Speaker 3: But its defining feature is the magnetic field. It has
Speaker 3: a magnetic field that is trillions of times stronger than Earth's.
Speaker 2: So strong it would literally rip you apart the atomic
Speaker 2: level if you got anywhere near it.
Speaker 3: That's the one. These are extreme, extreme objects, and the
Speaker 3: kind of energy required to produce a fast radio burst
Speaker 3: fits perfectly with what a magnetar can output during a
Speaker 3: stark wick or a magnetic reconnection event.
Speaker 2: But there's been a puzzle, a huge puzzle.
Speaker 3: If all FRBs are magnetars, why do some repeat and
Speaker 3: some don't? Why are some one and done, while others,
Speaker 3: like our friend ever B two two zero five two
Speaker 3: nine A keep flashing over and over.
Speaker 2: That is the million dollar question. Is it a different
Speaker 2: type of star or is it just in a different situation?
Speaker 3: And this discovery of a binary system points directly at
Speaker 3: the different situation answer.
Speaker 2: The relationship changes the behavior.
Speaker 3: Itrid be the key. Professor binghas Zeg proposes what he
Speaker 3: calls a unified physical picture. The hypothesis is that perhaps
Speaker 3: all FRBs really do originate from magnetars, but the ones
Speaker 3: that repeat maybe they repeat because they are in a
Speaker 3: binary system.
Speaker 2: So the partner star is somehow instigating it or enabling it.
Speaker 3: It could be a number of things. The interactions in
Speaker 3: a binary system might create a preferred geometry or a
Speaker 3: specific environment around the magnetar that makes the bursts easier
Speaker 3: for us to detect repeatedly. Or maybe the companion star
Speaker 3: is feeding material to the magnetar, which fuels more frequent bursts.
Speaker 2: Like stoking a fire. The isolated magnetar might have one
Speaker 2: big flare up and then it's done, but the one
Speaker 2: with a friend keeps getting more fuel shoveled into the furnace.
Speaker 3: That's one possibility an isolated magnetar might just act very
Speaker 3: differently than one that's constantly interacting with the companion's gravity,
Speaker 3: its stellar wind, its magnetic field. It completely shifts our
Speaker 3: understanding from thinking about these as isolated star is screaming
Speaker 3: in the dark, to well stellar relationships.
Speaker 2: It proves that FRBs aren't just random, isolated explosions. They
Speaker 2: can be complex interactions within a dynamic system.
Speaker 3: It makes the universe feel a lot more alive. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and interconnected. It's not just static points of light. It's systems,
Speaker 3: it's orbits, it's.
Speaker 2: Weather, it's stellar weather, and we're just now learning how
Speaker 2: to read the forecast from billions of light years away exactly.
Speaker 3: We used to think of space as this mostly static backdrop,
Speaker 3: but this shows it's full of events, flares, ejections, interactions
Speaker 3: that happen on human timescales weeks, not millions of years.
Speaker 2: So let's just take a moment and summarize this win
Speaker 2: for science. Yeah, because this really feels like a victory
Speaker 2: lap for the whole team involved.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, this is a triumph of collaboration. You have researchers
Speaker 3: from HKU, Purple Mountain Observatory, Union University and the University
Speaker 3: of Science and Technology of China all working together on this.
Speaker 2: Professor Swiffing Wu, who was the lead corresponding author, specifically
Speaker 2: mentioned the tireless work and persevering observations. And I think
Speaker 2: we really saw that in the story that seventeen months
Speaker 2: of watching and waiting.
Speaker 3: That's the perseverance right there. And we have to give
Speaker 3: credit to the technology. This discovery was only possible because
Speaker 3: of the extreme sensitivity of fast the China Sky Eye.
Speaker 3: You simply cannot do this science with a smaller telescope.
Speaker 3: You need the world's best sensitivity to catch a detail,
Speaker 3: to subtle a tiny twist in the light from two
Speaker 3: point five billion light years away.
Speaker 2: So looking forward, what's next? Now that we know at
Speaker 2: least some FRBs are in binary.
Speaker 3: Systems, now we need to know the statistics. Is this
Speaker 3: a fluke, was FRB two two zero five two nine
Speaker 3: a just an oddball? Or is this the standard model
Speaker 3: for repeaters? Continued monitoring might tell us how common these
Speaker 3: binary systems are.
Speaker 2: Are most FRBs married to another star or is.
Speaker 3: This a rare couple exactly? Is this the exception or
Speaker 3: is this the rule? We just don't know yet. We
Speaker 3: simply need more data, more stakeouts.
Speaker 2: More staring at boring stars for months at a time,
Speaker 2: just waiting for them to do something interesting.
Speaker 3: That's how discoveries are made.
Speaker 2: Well, I think this whole exploration has given us a
Speaker 2: completely new way to look at those little flashes in
Speaker 2: the sky.
Speaker 3: It certainly has for me.
Speaker 2: Let's synthesize this entire journey before we let you go. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we started with a mysterious flash, a cosmic flicker from
Speaker 2: two point five billion light years away.
Speaker 3: We had a massive telescope in China staring at it
Speaker 3: unblinking for seventeen straight months.
Speaker 2: Then we saw a sudden two week twist in the
Speaker 2: signal that RM flare.
Speaker 3: And we use that twist to realize that a neighbor
Speaker 3: star had, in effect sneezed a cloud of plasma right
Speaker 3: across our line of sight.
Speaker 2: A stellar sneeze caught on tape from across the universe.
Speaker 2: It's an incredible story.
Speaker 3: It's a reminder that the universe is just so dynamic.
Speaker 3: Even things that seem stable, like a repeating signal, can
Speaker 3: be subjected to these sudden, violent weather events caused by
Speaker 3: their neighbors.
Speaker 2: It really makes you think, if we can detect a
Speaker 2: star sneezing from two point five billion light years away
Speaker 2: just by looking at how it twists a radius.
Speaker 3: It raises a pretty provocative question, doesn't it it.
Speaker 2: Does, What other invisible events are we missing? What else
Speaker 2: is happening out there in the dark between the stars
Speaker 2: that we just haven't built the right filter to see yet,
Speaker 2: simply because we aren't staring at the right spot for
Speaker 2: long enough.
Speaker 3: That is the question that keeps the next generation of
Speaker 3: astronomers employed, and it's exactly why we keep building bigger
Speaker 3: and better telescopes.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for breaking this all down with us.
Speaker 2: It has been a really fascinating look at the binary
Speaker 2: secret of fast radio bursts.
Speaker 3: My pleasure. It's always good to look up.
Speaker 2: And to you listening. Keep looking up. You never know
Speaker 2: what you might see if you just stare long enough.
Speaker 2: Thanks for joining our investigation today. Goodbye for now, see
Speaker 2: you next time. The School dass U