Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. who specializes in science, space, physics, astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, quantum mechanics and technology. Rob's articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space and ZME Science.
Fast radio bursts are intense, short-lived blasts of radio waves hailing from beyond the Milky Way that can emit the same amount of energy in just thousandths of a second that the sun takes three days to emit.
Polarized light is made up of waves that are orientated in the same way — vertically, horizontally, or at an angle between those two directions. Changes in polarization could explain the mechanism that launched the FRB and thus reveal what its source was. Polarization can also reveal details about what environments the FRB needed to traverse before reaching our detectors on Earth. This study represented the first large-scale look at the non-repeating 97% of FRBs in polarized light.
"Other studies have looked at the polarization of maybe 10 non-repeating FRBs, but this is the first time where we've looked at more than 100. It allows us to reconsider what we think FRBs are and see how repeating and non-repeating FRBs may be different." "If the polarized light passes through electrons and magnetic fields, the angle at which it's polarized rotates, and we can measure that rotation," Pandhi said"So if an FRB passes through more material, it'll rotate more. If it passes through less, it'll rotate less."
"We know how pulsars work and we know the types of polarized light we expect to see from a pulsar system. Surprisingly, we don't see that much similarity between FRBs and pulsar light," Pandhi said."If these things are coming from the same type of object, you might expect that they have some similarities, but it seems that they're actually pretty different."
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