Unintentionally heartbreaking study claims that some planets may emit scream-like cosmic radio waves as they split apart.
Astronomer Yong-Feng Huang from Nanjing University recently spoke with Science News about his most recent study, which was revealed in the Astrophysics Journal. They demonstrate in it that planets breaking apart could be the cause of some of the recently discovered and inadequately understood fast radio bursts (FRBs).
FRBs were unknown to astronomers until the first one was discovered in archived telescope data in 2007. FRBs are brief radio wave bursts that still need to be completely understood.
Since then, researchers have struggled to understand why these enigmatic radio explosions continue to occur. They now have a novel alternative thanks to this new concept.
In their study, Huang and his colleagues thought that FRBs might be caused when ultra-dense neutron stars crash into their host planets. The idea is that when these planets fly by each other in their elliptical orbits, they tear each other apart, causing them to get longer, warp, and even break into whole pieces.
Researchers think that once these pieces of the planet are torn off, the neutron star’s stellar wind of particles and radiation may interact with them, causing what Huang called “extremely intense radio emissions.”
The astronomers from Nianjing compared their results to two “repeater” FRBs that had already been found. One was found in 2016 and repeats every 160 days, and the other was found in 2017 and repeats every 16 days. The study found that the idea of the end of the world could very well explain both FRBs that were looked at.
We still have a long way to go before we can figure out what or, more intriguingly, who is making FRBs, but the idea that they are a cosmic scream of radio waves adds drama.
Soucre; viralonce.xyz
