Researchers affiliated with the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) and the Survey for Transient Astronomical Radio Emission 2 (STARE2) group also partnered on the publications. These include multiple research articles published by the FAST team led by Zhang and collaborators from the National Astronomical Observatories of China and Peking University. Lee from the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Peking University, and corresponding author of the paper.įour other papers on FRBs were published in Nature on Nov. 'Our observations essentially rules out the GRB-like models and offers support to the pulsar-like models,' said K.-J. The polarization angles not only varied in each burst, the variation patterns were also diverse among bursts. Surprisingly, seven of the 11 bright bursts showed diverse polarization angle swings during each burst.

The team used FAST to observe one repeating FRB source and discovered 11 bursts from it. The GRB-like models predict a non-varying polarization angle within each burst whereas the pulsar-like models predict variations of the polarization angle. The other theory likens them more to radio pulsars, which are spinning neutron stars that emit bright, coherent radio pulses. One theory is that they're similar to gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), the most powerful explosions in the universe. Two competing theories have been proposed to interpret the mechanism of FRBs. We found the answer to the second question in this paper.' 'The first is what are the engines of FRBs and the second is what is the mechanism to produce FRBs.

'There are two main questions regarding the origin of FRBs,' said Zhang, whose team made the observation using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in Guizhou, China. The first paper, for which Zhang is a corresponding author and leading theorist, was published in the Oct.

UNLV astrophysicist Bing Zhang and international collaborators recently observed some of these mysterious sources, which led to a series of breakthrough discoveries reported in the journal Nature that may finally shed light into the physical mechanism of FRBs.

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