How a Canadian telescope found something in space we don’t understand

Clip You’re listening to a Frequency Podcast Network production in association with CityNews.

Jordan It’s always entertaining to hear average reactions to the things in outer space that science can’t quite explain. Lately, there have been a bunch of those.

Clip Okay, it’s a mysterious radio signal pulsing with constant regularity. Stay with us here. They’re called fast radio bursts, or FRBs, and they were detected using a radio telescope in Canada called CHIME.

Jordan I’ll get this out of the way first. No, sadly, it’s not aliens. But also, we still don’t know exactly what caused this fast radio burst, the first one we’ve seen with a distinct repeating pattern. Fast radio bursts themselves are fascinating, and we’ve only known about them for 15 years. As our equipment and knowledge of space exploration gets better and better, we are finding more and more things that we can’t quite explain. Each discovery poses more questions than answers at first. But eventually, we find the answers and they unlock even more questions, which leads to more discoveries. And if we keep exploring and discovering, at the end of that chain is the answer to the question we’ve been asking forever are we alone? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Marina Koren is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers all things space. Hey, Marina.

Marina Koren Hi, Jordan. How are you?

Jordan I am doing really well. I want to start first by asking you about the Canadian connection to this phenomenon we’re about to discuss. Tell me about the Canadian project that found this thing.

Marina Koren That’s right. So, yeah, the Canadian telescope that was behind the latest research on fast radio bursts and actually has contributed quite a lot to fast radio burst science is called CHIME. And Chime stands for the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, which is a very fancy name to describe what is basically a radio telescope that is ground-based and spends its time scanning the skies for interesting radio signals and any other weird stuff that’s reaching Earth from the cosmos.

Jordan Okay, so speaking of weird stuff reaching Earth from the cosmos, now you have to explain to me like I’m an idiot and also to our listeners what exactly a fast radio burst is, right?

Marina Koren Yeah, it’s not exactly common. Not many people know what fast radio bursts are. And I promise that I did not know what they were when I first started in science journalism. So a fast radio burst is a very brief flash of radio missions that comes from far beyond the Milky Way galaxy and somehow manages to travel all that way to reach us here on Earth and our telescopes and this Canadian telescope and astronomers call fast radio bursts, FRBs for short. And they are just super short-lived, very intense events. And Chime is great at catching them, and they come from all directions in the night sky. And astronomers believe that they are coming at us all the time. They’re just so ubiquitous out there.

Jordan How long have we been finding these things? I guess you already kind of mentioned this, but do we have any idea how many there are?

Marina Koren This particular field of astrophysics is actually very new. The very first FRB was detected in 2007. And at the time, astronomers weren’t quite sure what they were looking at. At first, they thought that the flash that their telescope detected could be noise coming from the actual telescope and its instruments. And they thought maybe this was a technical aberration of some kind and that’s usually what astronomers first think when their telescopes discover something new and weird because one, telescope data can be really noisy. And two, what are the chances that what you’re seeing is a completely new astrophysical phenomenon? So they were skeptical at first because they could see that these radio signals, whatever they were, just by looking at the nature of these emissions, they could tell that these flashes were coming from billions of light years away and yet they were still powerful enough that by the time they reached us here on earth, we could detect them. And that seemed pretty weird. But scientists kept detecting them and finding more, finding dozens, hundreds. And it turned out to be something real. It turned out to be a real astrophysical event that no one had ever seen before.

Jordan Do we know what they are and what causes them?

Marina Koren So that is a big mystery.

Jordan Right.

Marina Koren Scientists think that these FRBs are caused by certain kinds of stars known as a neutron star. And a neutron star isn’t anything like our own star. It’s not a sunlike star at all. It’s the leftover core of a once giant star that burned through its fuel and has entered a new stage of existence. And there’s more than one type of neutron star. And this is where things get a little bit funky because these stars have some pretty weird names. There’s something called a pulsar, which is a neutron star that rotates really fast and spits out beams of radiation from its poles. And there’s something known as a Magnetar, which sounds like something out of Greek mythology, but it’s a neutron star that’s known for powerful magnetic fields. And astronomers think that pulsars or magnetars might be the answer to the big FRB mystery because the way these particular stars behave and the way that cosmic material around them behaves that can produce the kind of intense radio signals that can travel through space at large distances and eventually reach us.

Jordan So, that’s great background on FRBs in general. But now, the reason we’re speaking to you today is because recently, this Canadian telescope that we were just discussing found a different kind of FRB, right? A peculiar one. What is it? And what’s so important or unusual about this one?

Marina Koren Yeah, I mean, I love this result because when I emailed and called my sources about it, they were like, this is huge in the FRB field, which is small. But this is an exciting, a big day for them.

Jordan It’s a big headline in a tiny newspaper.

Marina Koren Yeah, I mean, they have an FRB newsletter and everything where they report new detections. It’s a really vibrant and growing community. So most FRBs, as I said, they’re super short-lived. They only last a few milliseconds or so. But this one that was most recently detected lasted a thousand times longer than that. And 10 times longer for an FRB means it lasts 3 seconds, which is nothing to us. But it’s very unusual for a fast radio burst, which is supposed to be fast and burst-like, right? It’s not supposed to last for 3 seconds. So that was weird. And not only was this a long FRB, there was also something unusual about the signal itself. Inside the radio emissions, there were these little pulses that seemed to follow a clear-cut pattern. There would be these little peaks in intensity about every 2 seconds. And that’s something that scientists haven’t seen before. They have previously detected an FRB source that repeats so it will flicker on for a few days before quieting down again and then starting back up again. But this was the first time that the actual signal itself, the flash that they were seeing, had a rhythm inside of it, had a pattern within the signal itself. And that’s very new and that’s why the FRB community was very excited.

Jordan What are the ramifications of that amongst that community? All of a sudden you have something that’s so wildly different from what we’ve seen in the past and in a strict pattern as opposed to random bursts which must suggest all sorts of things to people.

Marina Koren Right. I think scientists are definitely excited about the fact that they might be missing this whole class of very long FRBs that they hadn’t seen before because since 2007 they thought that FRBs are very short-lived, a few milliseconds long. That’s what they were looking for. So if they saw something longer in their telescope data, they might have thrown it out because they didn’t think that’s what FRBs are like. But now they’re realizing maybe there’s a whole variety to these events, that there might be longer bursts and they might have more chances of catching those and then studying them. And I think it does strengthen the case for pulsars, these neutron stars being responsible for creating at least some FRBs. Because scientists have observed and studied pulsars within our own Milky Way galaxy and they’ve seen that these objects function almost as astrophysical clocks. They give off radio emissions in clean patterns and they’re very reliable. So maybe that’s what we’re seeing but from another galaxy far, far away. But for the first time, we’re seeing that pattern very clearly.

Jordan Now for the non-FRB community, You know, I have to ask this question because it’s the one everybody gets to is we all of a sudden get a signal from a galaxy far, far away. And unlike random noise, it is in a strict pattern, and it’s recognizable and repeatable. I know that it’s not true in this case, but what are the chances that this is how we learn about extraterrestrial life? It makes itself known in this sort of almost unrecognizable, yet recognizable pattern. Do you know what I mean?

Marina Koren Yeah, totally. This always comes up with FRP stories, and I have to ask my sources because I need to include our readers are going to want to know, is this aliens? So every time I call them, like, I have to ask, is this it? Is this something interesting?

Jordan Is this aliens again?

Marina Koren Right. And every time, the answer is no. But it’s completely understandable why we get excited because this is the kind of thing that we’re supposed to get excited about when we’re thinking about advanced life beyond Earth. Right. Patterns, evidence of organization, a sign of intent. But unfortunately, the natural universe is actually very, quite good at creating patterns and pulses. It’s common for normal astrophysical sources like pulsars to show periodic signals like the one that was most recently detected. So it’s weird. But weird doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not nature. And I talked to one astronomer who worked on SETI, which is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and she said that if the FRB if the source was pulsing out the digits of pi, then that’s when they’d call her in. If there was, I guess you could say, a pattern within the pattern, something that indicated something more. And that’s what SETI researchers are looking for. They’re looking for a signal that they feel confident that nature cannot make. And so far, FRBs don’t fall into that category.

Jordan What are they good for them if not telling us that aliens exist? Like, I’m only being tongue in cheek there. But what could figuring out these FRBs tell us about galaxies in the universe?

Marina Koren Yeah, I mean, it’s great fodder for the FRB newsletter, right? But no, there’s more to it than that, I think, because let’s say FRBs are produced by pulsars, and pulsars are known to be pretty reliable in the way that they emit radio emissions. So astronomers have used pulsars in our galaxy to study other types of astrophysical phenomena because they can kind of trace these radio emissions and see where they go and use them to understand other celestial objects. They kind of illuminate other parts of the universe to us. Astronomers have managed to learn something about Jupiter’s atmosphere, I think, just by studying the way that pulsars behave because a lot of astronomy is just looking at one type of thing to try to study another type of thing. And pulsars really help in that. And I think it’ll just help us understand the universe more, right? I mean, only since 2007 have astronomers been detecting these pulses, and that’s not so long ago. The universe is a lot more mysterious and weirder than we ever imagined. And FRBs, they’re a great big mystery and the universe is full of mysteries. And I think they remind us that we have to keep trying to understand these things and seeing what else we can learn from them.

Jordan Well, that’s why I wanted to talk about the big picture for a minute. And this is not strictly an FRB question, but if this phenomenon was only detected in 2007 and now we’re realizing, thanks to this new discovery, that there might be whole other kinds of these things out there that we don’t know, it feels to an observer and listeners of the show will know that. I love to talk about space and I love to ask the is it aliens question. But on a more serious note, it feels like we are making rapid progress at detecting unusual things in outer space, more so than we had been in the decades previous and again, that’s a layperson’s estimation. So I’ll ask you because this is your beat. Is the rate of discovery speeding up?

Marina Koren I think it is. I think we’re in a pretty interesting moment right now. And I should say that when polls were first detected maybe in the astronomers also thought that was really weird. They thought that was a telescope issue. So a lot of the things that come up and you’re like, what is that? And it turns out to be a real thing that’s super exciting. But just a few weeks ago, we, the public, saw the very first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, which is an international effort by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency to capture the most ancient light in the universe, to capture the way that stars and galaxies looked like at the very beginning, just after the Big Bang. And JWST, this is a super ambitious space telescope, 100 times more powerful than Hubble. And NASA expects that it will be functional for the next 20 years. And I have chills just talking about this. Number one, because I’m overwhelmed about how I’m going to cover all this. But two, because when Hubble launched, we didn’t quite know how flush the universe was with galaxies. Think of the Hubble Deep Field and how that really revealed to us the richness and fullness of the universe. The James Webb Space Telescope is going to do that and it’s going to uncover things that scientists are going to say, wait, is this just a glitch or is this something real? So I think we’re in for 20 years of really exciting discovery because of that mission.

Jordan How many things are out there? I know you can’t answer this with a number, but how many things like FRBs are out there that we’re going to find and be like, holy crap, what is this? And then figure out how it pertains to us or how it pertains to the universe?

Marina Koren Oh boy. Yeah, that’s such a big question.

Jordan That’s what I’m here for.

Marina Koren Yeah. It’s as unknowable as the universe itself. I think it’s possible. And astronomers and scientists I talked to, they feel confident that in the next 15,20, maybe 30 years, we might discover evidence of microbial life elsewhere in the solar system. We might finally get the answer to the question, Are we alone? It won’t be the same as detecting a beacon, spitting out the digits of pi coming up from another galaxy, but it will answer a very fundamental question. And I think the missions that are launching now, the telescopes that are coming online, it’s definitely the most I think the human species has never been better positioned to answer really big questions about the universe because the technology is so advanced now more than ever before. So I think the next half century will be really exciting, slightly terrifying, maybe, for answering very existential questions, and maybe we might even solve the FRB mystery. That would be pretty exciting.

Jordan Last question. Have you ever thought about how you will cover that day if it happens when we find evidence of microbial life or anything else that tells us we’re not alone?

Marina Koren Yes. I recently went to a SETI conference in Pennsylvania that was held in, like, if you walked into the room, you might think, oh, this is the association of Dermatologists. It just looks so mundane and like a typical conference that the people engaged there were engaged in trying to answer. What approaches should we take to try to find evidence of alien life? Where should we look? How should we look? How should we listen? And I remember telling everyone I met there, okay when you discover something, you call me. I want to know first. And I think it’s going to be an interesting story because astronomers might detect something and they think it’s weird and they’re not sure what causes it. But getting to the answer of what exactly it is might be similar to this FRB story, right? 15 years of detection, we still don’t know what causes it. It’s possible that astronomers might detect something weird, but they can’t say for sure what’s making it right. Even if you do detect something that screams out with aliens, how far are they? Do they still exist? What is the signal? There are so many. One answer, I think, will prompt even more questions. I think it’ll be super exciting, but oh, boy, I’m interested to see how people react.

Jordan Oh, I can’t wait. Marina, thank you so much for this. I love a good space talk.

Marina Koren Thanks so much, Jordan. This was fun.

Jordan Marina Koren getting ready to one day write that headline in The Atlantic. That was The Big Story. For more from us, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. Talk to us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. Email us [click here! and call us and leave us a voicemail. Send us a fast radio burst, 416-935-5935. If you’ve got a place where you can and review this podcast. I hope that you do. So tell them I sent you. Say hi. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow. Back to top of page