What are fast radio bursts and what causes them?

Learn about the mystery behind fast radio bursts with Daniel and Jorge

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Jor, I have a question for you about how
you use your microwave. It's about how I am prepared
my dinner on it or not. No, this is about
whether you wait for it to stop and ding, or
whether you impatiently yanked the door open before it's finished. Yeah.
I think sometimes I opened it without waiting for it
to end. Is that bad? Am I going to get irradiated?

(00:30):
It's that dangerous. It's not dangerous to you. Is it
dangerous for my pets or my dinner? Everybody in your
house is perfectly safe, but you might be ruining the
life of some graduate students nearby if they're running a
particularly sensitive science experience. Well, they're welcome to come sharing
my popcorn. Hi am or hammy cartoonist and the creator

(01:06):
of PhD comics. Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist,
and I always wait for the ding. Well, wait no more,
and welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe,
a production of I Heart Radio in which we look
around the universe and try to explain it to you.
We find crazy, interesting, amazing, mind blowing stuff that scientists

(01:26):
hardly understand and try to bring you to that forefront
of misunderstanding. That's right, all the weird and unexplained phenomena
out there, and also safety tips for your microwave of
a usage. That's right. We dove into the details of
how microwaves work on a recent episode, but today we're
going to talk about how microwaves might ruin everything for science.

(01:48):
It is one of these um physics destroys the universe
kind of things, like little mic microwaves collapse the Higgs
field somehow. No, no, maybe Marcos will save the universe
by stymying physics. Right, what if with your microwave and
you could stop the LHC from operating? Is that a setting?
Maybe I missed that setting? Is it like reheat defrost

(02:09):
ruined science? You know? That brings up a good point
because microwaves have so many settings that I think probably
nobody ever uses, right, only people only ever use them,
like the popcorn button and like add one minute button. Yeah.
I always wonder if there's like a secret code, you know,
like videos. You know how some video games have like
special sequence. You can unlock special up, down, down, left, right,

(02:31):
A A B B, and all of a sudden, you're
playing video games on your microwave. Yeah, there you go.
I'm sure, I'm sure, but no, microwaves don't hold secrets
to the universe, but they have been known to sty
me the progress of physics. And that's what we're gonna
be talking about today. Yeah, and it ties into how
sometimes you know, how sensitive sometimes science is. That's right.

(02:54):
If you want to listen to something which came all
the way from the other side of the universe, you
have to listen very carefully, and that means you're gonna
be listening to tiny little signals from space. And also
every signal from Earth nearby is going to be trying
to drown that out. So scientists have to get really
good at figuring out all the other things that could

(03:14):
mimic their signal, all the terrestrial sources of noise. You
have to get really good at telling everyone else to
turn other cell phones basically, that's right. Scientists are like
those grumpy neighbors telling you turn down your music, except
they want you to turn down everything. So to the
under program, we'll be talking about fast Radio berths or

(03:37):
Fast and Mysterious were your birth that's right. What's the
official title of these? I think they're called fast Radio bursts,
but they are definitely mysterious, and a bunch of listeners
have written in and said, please explain fast radio burse
to us, So here we are. Are they also furious?
That would be pretty pretty good branding Fast and Furious
radio berths. No, because then they money to Vin Diesel

(04:01):
every single time we mentioned it. That would be a movie, right,
that's what should do that. That would be like Fast
and the Furious seventeen. They go into a radio telescope
and drive it around the telescope. You know, I love
those movies because every single one they somehow managed to
like one up the previous one. You know, the last

(04:22):
one they had a submarine. Here they have like a
helicopter with a submarine attached to it, swinging around a
rocket ship. It's incredible. Do your physics sense is cringe
when you watch these movies? No, No, they usually get
the physics pretty pretty much accurate on those movies. You know,
there's no science fiction here. It's it's mostly just trajectories
and explosions. Yeah, it's pretty accurate. Yeah. So there's something

(04:42):
called fast radio waves and there are They are kind
of mysterious, right, Nobody knows where they come from. That's right.
Nobody knows where they come from, and they're sort of
a recent mystery. They were discovered only twelve years ago
by a summer student, like an undergrad. Have you ever
had this science experience to where you go to do
a summer undergraduate project and somebody just says, here, go

(05:05):
plow through all this data. Um, maybe as a way
to get rid of you, maybe as a way to
just keep you busy, um, And nobody ever expects to
accomplish anything. Well, this student did. Well. I can't say
I've had the experience of being an undergrad scientist. Um,
but it's pretty cool to think, yeah, that someone who
who's that young can discover something nobody else has done before. Yeah, exactly.

(05:27):
And it's cool to think we've discovered something uh as
recently as two thousand and seven. Absolutely, And it's just
another example of how every time we look out into
the universe we find weird stuff. The universe is just
chock full of unexplained, really bizarre phenomena, and each of them,
each of them is a clue that there's something going

(05:49):
on out there that we don't understand, some new type
of objects, some new kind of physics, some new kind
of life. Who knows, But each one is the universe
sending us a message saying there's something here to learn.
There's something mysterious in your microwave. Open it, open it right.
If you've been cooking that popcorn since two thousand and seven,
then you're in trouble. I'm still waiting for it to

(06:11):
stop popping. You know, it's still pops every once in
a while. Yeah. And the the other lesson to be
learned here is that while this was discovered by an undergraduate,
his advisor got all the credit for it. The undergrad
got no credit. Well, you know, the professor sent him
off and said, hey, spend your summer looking through this
old data. Maybe you'll find something interesting. And then he
came back with this saying, like, look at this huge

(06:32):
weird pulse I found. What is that? And now it's
named after the professor. Well, he did direct the student
to look for it, so you know that's like, uh,
that's obviously fair. Yeah right, yeah, like Einstein's supervisor. Right,
go be smart. All right, Well, now I get credit
for all your discoveries. Well I had never heard of
these fast radio burs, much less any fast mysterious radio burs,

(06:57):
But we were wondering how many people out there had maybe,
may you something that was in the news or something.
Daniel went out and asked people on the street if
they knew what a fast radio burst was. That's right,
several of our listeners were curious about it. But I
was wondering, is this something that sort of seeped into
the common understanding? Is this a mystery that people think
about or have you even heard about? Yeah? So I

(07:17):
think for a second, if random scruffy physicists approach you
on the street and ask you, hey, what's a fast
radio burst? Well, would you say to a microphone. Here's
what people had to say. I have heard of it,
but I don't know what it is. I've heard of them.
I I couldn't tell you about them, but yes, I
have heard of them. Uh no, no, I have not.

(07:40):
All right, not a lot of people knew about these
fast radio birsts. Yeah, pretty much. Zero. I mean some
folks claimed have maybe heard of them, but I didn't
really quiz them on it. I was being generous, So
not a lot of I mean you think that maybe
they were lying, like maybe they were they hadn't really
heard of it, But they were just trying to sound smart. Yeah,
maybe a little bit. You know, somebody talks about some

(08:01):
brand new topic in science to you, you might not
have long be like, oh, I think I heard about that.
I'm not sure. Or maybe it just tickles some memory
you had in your mind. Anyway, nobody, what do you
think this podcast? Every time? Daniel, I'm just nodding along. Well,
you're doing a great job of faking it. So and
then most people have never heard of a fast radio

(08:23):
burse exactly. And so I hope that those folks out
there who have never heard of fast radio burse will
be amazed at what they learned today about this crazy, mysterious,
amazing signal from the stars. All right, so let's break
it down now. So the name of it doesn't sound
very complicated. I mean, it's just fast radio bursts. So
I think I know what each of those words mean,

(08:44):
but together they form something mysterious. Well, you're assuming that
physicists have been clear in their naming and that you
can sort of you reverse engineer the concept from the
name of it. So I'm proud that you have such
confidence in our skill. Well, I'm just wondering how they
were able to get this through the trademark office, you know,
like it's such a generic name, fast radio burs you know,

(09:09):
you're right, it's like trademarking um brown table table cloths.
You know. I'm not sure it's been um copyrighted or
trademarked UM, but you know, for our upcoming movie starring
Vin Diesel, then we'll definitely want to get on that.
You call it the Fasten the birst tea. Yeah, exactly, No,
you're right, it's pretty straightforward. I mean, these are bursts

(09:30):
of emissions in the radio spectrum, right, and remember radio
waves are just one kind of electromagnetic radiation. You have
radio waves down at the long wavelength part of the spectrum,
and you've got visible light, you know, you know, hundreds
of nanometers, and then you get up to X rays
and gamma rays, the very high energies, very small frequencies.

(09:50):
So remember what you call it just depends on the
frequency of the electromagnetic radiation we're talking about. And radio
waves are down at the lower end, meaning that they
are low frequency relatively speaking. So these guys have really
long wavelengths so have lower frequency, and these kind of
radio waves that we're talking about, they're like four hundred megaherts,
so fourteen million times the second is the frequency of

(10:14):
these waves, yeah, exactly. And you know that's the same
kind of frequency as the electromagnetic radiation that's used to
send you radio into your car, right, which is why
we call them radio waves. All right. There are lots
of sources of radio waves in the universe, right, Like
black holes make radio waves, the center of galaxies make
radio waves, the Sun makes radio waves. You know, Jupiter

(10:37):
makes radio wave. Powers make radio waves exactly. Vin Diesel
I think has his own radio station now. But there's
lots of sources, and there's a huge field of radio astronomy, right,
and mostly these things are just sort of like pulsing
out continuous radiation. But in two thousand and seven they
heard for the first time this fast radio bursts. So
burst means like it's not continuous, it's just like it's

(11:00):
somebody screaming in space. Right. It's very short lived. That
sounds a little horrific. So it's just so fast. Radio
burst is just like a quick pulse, like a quick
burst of these low frequency light waves radio waves exactly.
And by burst we mean like order milliseconds, right, It's

(11:21):
not like gamma ray bursts that lasts you know, two
seconds or thirty seconds. These are milliseconds, so they're very
very brief, which is why they were originally overlooked. You know,
when this underground found him, he didn't like hear them
for the first time. He went back into old data.
He found this like it had already been recorded. The
data was just sitting there. Nobody had looked through it

(11:41):
and seen this before. It was very short lived, which
I guess why I didn't trigger any alarms or anything.
And it was just a once, one time event that
he discovered. You could listen to these on the radios.
I mean like if you had the radio tune to
the right frequency, you would hear a little every once
in a while. Yeah, you can. You can do radio
astronomy using your radio. Right, you can listen to that
kind of stuff. Um, you can hear. Some of the

(12:03):
static that you hear from radio is radio waves from
the Sun or from Jupiter or from the center of
the galaxy. Right. Space is filled with this, kidding, and
some of them get down to Earth. Yeah, so you
can listen to the universe. The sound of the universe
is s doesn't have great rhythm the universe is telling
you to shut up. You know, this is a burst

(12:25):
of energy and it's not that loud. Like, it's not
like this was a huge spike that that he noticed.
It was a little bit of a blip. You know. Um,
it's not not very loud, but it's above the general noise, right,
it was large enough to be seen above the just
sort of radio noise you get from the Sun or Jupiter,
from the center of the galaxy. And it was odd,
and so he asked his advisor. He said, you know,

(12:47):
what's this? What could make this? And the guy had
no idea. You know, we had never seen such a
short lived pulse of energy. So this Undergraund was combing
through some data and he saw these little blips like
all of a sudden, this, uh, the signal at that
frequency kind of jumped. Yeah, but just one blip, just
one blip, yeah, exactly, and you gotta wonder, like, what

(13:08):
is this summer project? You just like gave him a
pilot data and said, look through this, see if you
find anything. You've never done that, Daniel, I don't do
that to my students. No, I give them like supervision.
I tell I set them up, I tell them like
try this, try that, and just say like that's like saying,
go to the basement of the library, figure it out.
So if you find anything interesting, you know, you gotta

(13:29):
give them some more direction than that. But this kid
actually found something amazing. Yeah, maybe you should try it
all right, next summer, I'm sending all my students to
the basement the library. Just combed through random part of
physic data. You might find some new phenomenon named that
for you. I'm just gonna print out all the LEDC
data into a huge pile and tell them to comb

(13:52):
through it. No, so there was this short lived pulse, right,
and he didn't understand it. He never seen anything like
it before. They were very curious about it, but it
was the only one anybody had ever seen. So they
started going back and looking through old data to see
could they find more? And did they They did, But
then they ran into a bit of a snag. See,
a lot of people were wondering, like where does this

(14:12):
come from? How do you know that this actually comes
from space? Right? And it doesn't just come from like
some other source of noise, because there's huge numbers of
sources of radio waves, right, Like all the radio stations
on Earth. Right, so before you can conclude it something
it really is astronomical, you have to rule out everything else.
And there are maybe at the local radio station, the

(14:34):
DJ accidentally hit the bun and created these little yeah,
although you know in this frequency range, radio stations don't emit.
And you know, radio stations have a certain frequency range
that they're allowed to transmit on, and this one in
particular was reserved for radio astronomy. Right, so the night
the sky is supposed to be quiet in this frequency

(14:56):
so that we can listen to the universe. But you know,
there are known sources and interference here and there, and
nobody had ever seen this kind of thing, so they
had to try to sort of track it down. And
when they were looking through the old data, they found
a bunch of them from this one observatory in Australia,
the Park's observatory. What do you mean, like everybody started
looking through their old data, or this was done in Australia.

(15:19):
Everybody started looking through their old data. But the folks
in Australia looked through there and they found a whole
bunch of these little blips, and they thought, well, there's
no way that these are all astronomical, and because of
the way the antenna was pointed, they got a clue
that some of these blips might actually be from something nearby,
and this cast a huge shadow on the initial discovery.
People thought, well, if these blips they're seeing in Australia

(15:42):
are just something here on Earth, then one of the
chances that the two thousand seven discoveries actually some weird
signal from space. Yeah, let's talk about that a little
bit more. But first quick break, So what do you

(16:06):
mean the way that antenna was pointed, like it was
pointing downwards or you know, to my house or somebody's house,
or what you mean. The biggest clue to understanding where
something comes from is when do you see it? Right?
Do you see it when you're pointing at the sky?
Do you see it when you're pointing always the same
direction on Earth? Or do you see when you're like
always pointing at the same thing in the sky, Like
if you point your antenna at the same star and

(16:29):
then you always see a signal, you wonder or maybe
it comes from that star. But if your antenna is
if you always see the signal when you're pointed it,
like you know, some nearby building, then you wonder if
it comes from that building. And so in this case,
they had clues from when they saw these signals that
it might be coming from something nearby instead of from
something in space, because it didn't correlate to any particular

(16:49):
direction in space. Oh, I see. So it looks like
if you hear voices in your head, no matter which
way you're standing or who you're surrounded by, then maybe
the voices are not coming from outside of your head. No,
that's a perfect analogy. That's a perfect analogy. So they
started to worry that maybe some of these things were
coming from something nearby. I mean, the guys are not insane,

(17:10):
they're not coming from actually inside their head. But they
had to try to track this down, and it took
them years and years and years, but they finally figured
out that one of the sources of these things was
not actually astronomical crazy stuff happening out there in space,
but it was the staff at the observatory going on break.

(17:32):
They correlated the times. But here we're just talking about
that one observatory in Australia, right, but not the one
found by the undergrad that's right, the one in Australia
had a bunch of these, and so people thought, well,
you know, maybe none of these things are real. Then
they figured out that they would see a very similar
kind of pulse when the staff at this observatory in
Australia would heat up their food on break and open

(17:55):
the door to the microwave before it stopped cooking, and
it was this brief moment of interfering. RAN's like you
know when you open the door to the microwave. Of
course the microwave shuts off, but this is like a
little blip, little blip of radiation that comes out. It's
not dangerous levels, but it is enough to interfere with
the operation of a supersensitive ear. Right, that's what a

(18:15):
telescope is, it's a super sensitive ear. And so they
correlated this to when those guys were going on break
and they verified it, like went over to the marcro
wave and tried it, and they could tell that that's
what was creating some of those signatures. So it was
picking up the actual microwaves coming from the oven or
just like the act of shutting down the microwave emittor

(18:37):
in their oven when you open the door. That's somehow creates,
you know, amidst radiation in this weird frequency, there's a
little bit of microwave energy that actually escaped. Yeah, and
if you wait for the to ding in the microwave
turned off before you opened it, then none of it escaped.
But if you just yanked the door open before it
was finished, and this little blip would sneak out. Um,

(18:59):
and that's what caused some of these fake astronomical signals.
So my microwave operates at at the same radio frequency,
says radio, it's enough to interfere. Yeah, exactly. Um. The
frequency spectrums overlap a little bit. And it was hard
to pin down because you know, sometimes the staff would
let the microwave ding in other times they were a

(19:19):
little more impatient and they would yank it open. So
it wasn't like every single day at six pm, it
was like that one guy or the one woman just
you know Bob or Sally, that just the impatient, impatient
one in the staff that just um was making all
this funs for everybody. Yeah, exactly. I remember when this
paper came out, it was like two thousand fifteen. The

(19:40):
paper came out when they identified the source of these
things as literally like microwave background. And you know, because
we have this other thing in physics called the cosmic
microwave background. There were a lot of jokes about Australian
microwave background versus cosmic microwave background, like this is literally
a background due to microwaves in Australia. They actually polished this.

(20:02):
They said, we had a bunch of signals, but it
turned out to be bob in with the microwave exactly. No,
it's a hilarious paper, um, and you know, it's a
nice piece of work. You know, you understand you've got
to really dig into your your signals sometime and understand
where they come from. And the folks, for example, a ligo,
the ones looking for gravitational waves, they do similar sort
of stuff. They have to understand like traffic paths, the

(20:25):
microwave too early. Yeah, well, everything affects them. They're looking
for tiny little shakes, so they have to understand like, oh,
at this time of day, big trucks tend to roll
by and that shakes it in this certain way and
blah blah slams the door nearby two miles away. They're
super sensitive, so they have to catalog all the sources
of noise before they can identify something as a signal.

(20:45):
So in the same way you see a weird signal
on your day that you gotta try to rule out,
you know, prosaic explanations, and this was one. And so
until they did that, people didn't really believe that fast
radio bursts might actually be an astronomical thing because this explanation.
But once they isolated this explanation, they ought to remove those.
They could tell which ones came from microwave ovens and

(21:07):
which ones didn't. Then people started to believe, Okay, maybe
these other ones you know from other observatories, um, actually
are something astronomical. You mean the ones that were found
by the undergrad or do people find other ones? The
one found by the undergrad people now thinks is believable.
And people have been combing through data and they found, um,

(21:28):
just under a hundred other examples of mysterious fasts. Yeah, exactly.
And now that we've removed you know, Bob's microwave usage
is an explanation for some of them, Um, we can
start to believe that these really do come from space.
All right, So Bob's Bob did something good. Bob delayed
the understanding of radio bursts for at least five years,

(21:51):
so I'm not sure you can give them any positive
points for that. By creating an artifice, it kind of
sharpened scientists ears, so now they can sort of tell
when something is artificial or not. And so now maybe
you have more confidence that the ones you've seen are
actually mysterious radio births from space. Yeah, I'm amazed at
your ability to spin that into a positive story. Yes,

(22:12):
nicely done. Well, Bob, slip me a hundred. Put in
a good word for her. Bob or Bob's sister. Whoever
did this needs a serious reputation rehabilitation program. No, but
since then, we've identified something on the order of a
hundred or just less of these examples in data from
around the world. All right, well, let's get into what

(22:32):
could be making these mysterious radio bursts and whether or
not you should wait for the ding in your microwave.
But first, let's take a quick break. All right, Daniel,

(22:55):
So what can make these mysterious fast radio burbs? We
were hearing them from space. We're pretty sure it's not
Bob with the microwave accidentally causing this noise. Um, So
something must have caused these one hundred weird signals that
we've seen something or someone. Right, that's always the question.
You know what you do in astronomy, I I guess

(23:17):
not being an astronomer. Is you like, you see some
new weird signal and then you look through your category,
your you look through your catalog of stuff in the
universe and ask could this make that noise? Could this
make that noise? And there's nothing out there that we
know of, And there's a lot of crazy stuff out
there making all sorts of strange signals, but none of
the things that we are aware of can make this

(23:38):
kind of pulse. What do you mean nothing you're aware of?
Like doesn't the Sun make radiation and radaways? Or you
know what I mean, Like, how do you know that
the Sun isn't making these births? Yeah, well they're not
coming from the direction of the sun right there. Coming
they come from all over the sky. And if you ask,
like where do they come from? In general, they don't
even come in general from the direction of the Milky Way.

(24:00):
Like if there was something from our galaxy, then you
expected to come from something sort of in the plane
of the Milky Way. You know that band of scot
of stars you see like dribbled across the sky. If
it's something from our galaxy, some like weird kind of
star in our galaxy, you'd expect to see it more
in the direction in the Milky Way, but we don't.
We see in all sorts of directions, which means it's

(24:21):
most likely coming from outside our galaxy. They're definitely not
all coming from the Sun. That's be easy to figure out.
You know that they're not coming from our galaxies. So
it must be something super far away, which means at
the origin it must be like a super powerful burst
to be able to hear something. To be able to
see a signal from so far away means that it

(24:42):
has to be incredibly intense that its source. Remember these
other galaxies, I mean, our galaxy is huge, rights a
hundred thousand light years across, but these other galaxies there
are millions of light years away. And you know, if
we send a signal to those galaxies, even if we
directed it, it would be pretty pretty hard for any
ready to hear it, because these signals dropped by one

(25:03):
over the distance squared, So you go twice as far
the signal is four times as quiet. You go a
thousand times as far right, and the signals a million
times quieter. So to be able to hear it from
so far away exactly means that at the source that
has to be crazy intense, and we also just don't
know anything crazy intense and very brief sort of sad

(25:25):
trombone sounds. What do you mean is a sad trombone? Well,
if you look at the frequencies, the frequency sort of shift.
It's not like a single frequency. It starts off at
a higher frequency and then it drops quickly to a
lower frequency. So it sort of sounds like a sad trombone,
and you know, like a warm Oh I see. So

(25:46):
maybe it's just the universe providing a soundtrack to my
to my comedy. Every time you make a bad joke,
we hear a fast radio burst. We'd be hearing a
lot more of them, That's all I gotta say. Right,
every time I say a joke, you know, got up there,
it hits the button and the audience gets a little world. Yeah. So,

(26:08):
so how powerful are these then? Well, we're not exactly sure.
Some of them we've located, like a few of them
have repeated, so we've been able to like spot exactly
where they're coming from because it came because we've heard
them more than once. Um. But estimates are that they
have as much energy in just one of these pulses
as our sun puts out in eighty years of learning. Right,

(26:29):
So it's frying you, it's causing summer, it's you know,
toasting mercury. All that energy put out by the Sun
over eighty years. Concentrate that into a few milliseconds. That's
the amount of energy we're talking about. If what we're
hearing is coming from another galaxy, then that's how powerful
it must be. When it happens, it must be like

(26:49):
some kind of explosion or some big event. It's definitely
some kind of big event. And you know, we don't
have a whole lot of data because we only have,
like you know, less than a hundred examples, and each
one is really brief. You don't have a lot of
information on each one. It's not like you have a long,
extended tail you can study. But we can do really
clever tricks. We can like ask, like, you know, what's

(27:09):
the arrival time and this frequency versus the other frequency,
and we can use that to think about like how
it propagates through the universe because different kinds of stuff
in the universe allow different frequency signals to propagate at
different speeds or block them or whatever. So we have
these things. It's called the dispersion measure that tells us
like how spread out is the signal. And all these

(27:30):
things are totally consistent with a really small source, really
really really far away source, meaning that the thing that
makes these can't be really big. It's not like an
entire galaxy is emitting this thing. It's something that's like
a few hundred kilometers across. Wait, how do we know this?
Because of the way there's sort of the shape of

(27:50):
a pulse. Right. First of all, it's really really short, right,
So if you have some huge object that's creating a
signal and it's really enormous, then you're gonna hear a
longer signal just because if it comes from the back
of it, you'll take longer to get to you, right.
But if it comes from a tiny little source like
a point or something like a meter across, then it's

(28:12):
possible to create a really really tight signal. And so
because this thing only lasts a millisecond, then you can
give us a sense like a rough and order magnitude
estimate for the size of the object that's making it.
Something really big makes a really big pulse, then you know,
just the physics of it wouldn't allow it to create
something so sharp. Yeah, exactly, you need something really small

(28:36):
to create a really sharp signature. And you know, this
is the kind of thing we do in physics. Were like,
let's squeeze as much information as we can out of
this tiny little bit of data. And so that's what
we know. It's something super far away, kind of small
and really intense, and there's just nothing in our catalog
of knowledge that's capable of producing that. Let's jump right

(28:57):
into what could it be? Aliens? You know, aliens are
on the top of my list for I think you
always put any at the top of your list, Daniel. So, no,
astrophysics are very creative bunch. And so what they do
when they're sitting in front of this kind of mystery
is they try to get creative and they say, well,
but if we take something which is capable of creating

(29:18):
radio waves and it's really intensely powerful, like a magnetar.
Remember what a magnetar is. It's a super category of
neutron star, right, A neutron star. That's different than a minotaur, right,
that's right, it's it's at the center of the maze. No,
it's a pulsar that's super duper powerful and has a

(29:39):
crazy magnetic field. And they're looking at thinks that have
a lot of magnetic fields because this is e M radiation.
So they're thinking maybe it's some like weird twist in
a magnetic field that the magnetic field buckles and shocks
or whatever, and that creates these pulses. And so one
category of ideas is like, maybe it's like a an

(30:00):
earthquake on the surface of a magnetar that creates like
a little burst of energy, a little shock wave of energy. Yeah.
And even that's not a quake on the surface of
a star, yeah, starquakes, right, that sounds like an awesome
science fiction novel starquake, Yeah. Yeah. And so they call
these things hyper flares when a magnetard just like bursts

(30:23):
out a big explosion of energy. But even those hyper
cracks somehow, yeah, you know, like a yeah, like it
cracks or like it it um. Yeah, We'll think about
what happens in an earthquake exactly. These the plates rub
up against each other and you get a release of energy.
So it's not an exact analogy to what's happening on
the surface of this magnetard and another galaxy, but it's

(30:45):
it's similar. And even that, the calculation suggest is not
enough to power these things. So now they're thinking about,
like what happens and then maybe another one follows it,
and the two interfere in this way that gives this
first one a boost. I mean they're having a really,
really reached to the bottom of the barrel here to
come up with explanations for what might explain these things.

(31:05):
And there are other models as models, like maybe it's
some strange thing it happens when a black hole eats
a neutron star, although by now we've seen a few
of those with our gravitational wave detectors, and they don't
always come with fast radio bursts, so I think that
explanation is is not as popular. But the signals from
the gravitational waves are sort of similar, aren't they. And

(31:26):
aren't they also like a sad trombone and also really short? Yeah,
but they have a sort of a ringdown effect. They're
like a wan wan wan wan wan wan wan um,
And I think they're longer than just a few milliseconds.
But actually I don't remember the details. Another explanation, which
I love only because the name is awesome, is that

(31:47):
people think it might be this kind of star called
a blitz Are. Blitz Are, Yeah, blitz Are is named
after Yeah, of course, you know you're in the situation
room and you gotta come up with an explanation, and
so you reach with the blitzer and and your beard
just radiates energy. And they called it the blitzer. That's right,
And that's going to be the plot for the next

(32:09):
movie with Vin Diesel and Wolf Blitzer. Right there, you
go fasten the blitze part. Blitz Are is a special
kind of pulse are that sometimes collapses and turns into
a black hole. And I don't know why they called
it a blitz are, but they think that maybe when
that happens, perhaps it releases this kind of energy. But

(32:30):
you know, people are really stretching when it's becoming a
black hole. It cries out one less blitz yeah, exactly.
It's like it's maybe that's where it comes from. It's
the death rattle of a pulsar. Perhaps, all right, but
that's just one possibility. Another possibility, and what else could
it be. Well, there are other crazy ideas, like maybe
it's some strange quantum mechanical effect. You know, there are

(32:51):
really weird quantum mechanical things that happen in every star,
Like you know, how does light get from the inside
of a star out into the universe? Right? That requires
quantum mechanical things like tunneling, which we talked about in
another podcast episode. And so some people have come up
with a strange quantum mechanical entanglement effect called super radiance

(33:11):
when a big blob of the star sort of gets
entangled and and this could happen like if you're really
close to the center of a galaxy, and when a
big blob of stuff becomes sort of quantum mechanical on
a macroscopic scale, that they can do things that the
individual blob not can't necessarily. And one of the ideas
is this super radiance that they can admit a huge

(33:32):
pulsive energy all at once. But this is really one
of the more fringe theories. Wait, the idea is that
the whole sun, the whole star sort of becomes quantum
synchronized or something. And the idea and not the whole
star that that would be cool, but sort of a
large blob of it um, you know, and the large
blob is a hundred kilometers or something, so that would

(33:53):
be pretty awesome. We do sort of similar experiments on Earth.
It's related Bose Einstein condensates our materials, where a bud
just stuff has the same quantum state, and so that
has a macroscopy of properties. But that those are usually
super tiny, aren't they aren't they um like the size
of a of a few atoms or something. Yeah, we've
never succeeded in building one that's you know, that's really macroscopic.

(34:17):
That's like, you know, meters wide for sure. No, we
never never achieved that. But there is a relationship between
that kind of thing and these sort of super radiance effects.
But it's all this is all just speculation. And the
thing I love about this is we have the data. Right,
This is not just people sitting around thinking, maybe this
happens inside of stars, maybe this thing, let's give this

(34:39):
thing this funny name. Here, we're trying to explain something real, right.
The universe is telling us there's this new weird thing
out there you do not know about. And it's a clue, right,
it's a clue that we have to unravel, and in
decades to come, somebody will understand what causes these things.
And it could be something new and amazing and crazy,
or it could just be like, oh, some new phase

(35:01):
of the life of a neutron star. And you're pretty
sure it's not Bob with the microwave down in the kitchen. Look,
Bob has been fired, okay, so he's not creating a
more problem with me. He went to work somewhere else,
or she went to work somewhere else. No, they're much
more careful now with the microt waves at radio astronomy facilities.
But though that is one of the funnest papers I've
ever read. Now they've ruled out, But it could be

(35:23):
it could be an alien, an alien Bob somewhere else
in the universe opening it's giant, super radiant Blitzer star
early too early before the day, causing these things. You know,
I've never heard that explanation. I think you might have
solved this right here live on the podcast. Or you're

(35:43):
going Nobel prize plate please, Yeah, the Nobel prize for
that one is just a bag of popcorn. Actually, what
it was my undergrad who came up with that explanation,
but I am taking all the credit. At least share
the popcorn with him, will you? All right? So that's uh,
yet another incredible mr you out there in the universe
that we are pretty sure is there, but we can't

(36:03):
explain what is causing you. That's right, The universe is
telling us here's a clue, there's something weird. You don't understand,
figure it out, and it's We're only a decade in
and we still basically have no idea what this thing is.
So the next time you reheat something in your microwave,
for the love of science, please wait for it to
ding all of science. Thanks you for your patients. If

(36:35):
you still have a question after listening to all these explanations,
please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you.
You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at
Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at
Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening,
and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from

(36:57):
my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows h