The Mystery of Fast Radio Bursts

The Supermassive Podcast

Izzie Clarke

Astronomy, History, Science, Physics

4.6 • 556 Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2024

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Supermassive Team are investigating strange blasts of energy in space called Fast Radio Bursts. What are they and where do they come from? Dr Stuart Ryder from Macquarie University in Australia joins Izzie, Dr Becky and Robert to help explain.

Christmas Present Ideas

Astronaut Chris Hadfield’s talk - A Journey into The Cosmos
Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition at Royal Museums Greenwich
Telescope SeeStar S50
Image stabilising binoculars
Cosmos (book) from DK
The Impossible Man by Patchen Barrs.
The Little Book of Cosmic Catastrophes by Sarah Webb
The Night Sky Almanac for 2025 by Radmila Topalovic, Storm Dunlop and Wil Tirion

Keep sending your brilliant questions and photos to podcast@ras.ac.uk or on Instagram @SupermassivePod.

The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media production for the Royal Astronomical Society. The producers are Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The hardest to explain of these fast radio bursts are the ones that repeat.
0:05.4	They saw us big flash.
0:07.2	And then nothing.
0:07.9	They didn't see any other signals from that direction.
0:10.0	Until just a few weeks ago, it ended up being the oldest fast radio burst ever to be detected.
0:18.9	Hello and welcome to the supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me,
0:24.7	science journalist, Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smethurst.
0:28.9	Now, for all of you listening last month, I can confirm that we have actually decided on an episode topic finally.
0:36.6	It's the end of the year, okay?
0:38.2	And this month, it's all about mysterious blasts of energy in space
0:42.3	called Fast Radio Bursts.
0:44.7	And as always, Dr. Robert Massey,
0:46.7	the deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society is here.
0:50.2	So, Robert, aside from these fast radio bursts being a bit of a mystery, what are they?
0:56.7	Yeah, exactly. That's the great question. They're a bit of mystery. What are they?
0:59.7	Well, we can say what they're characterized by. So they're bursts of radio waves that are very short-lived,
1:04.8	and they are last anything from even a fraction of a millisecond, a fraction of a thousandth of a second,
1:09.3	up to maybe about three seconds long. And they're only discovered back in 2007, in data from 2001 from the Parks Observatory, Radio Observatory in Australia. And as it implies, they're in the radio spectrum. You know, you don't see visible light with them, although they might be associated. But basically, these are radio bursts. And they were discovered by an astronomer originally from the
1:27.8	UK actually who happened to be at Manchester at the same time as I was in the early 1990s Duncan
1:32.4	Lorimer he's in West Virginia with his PhD student David Narcovich you must have been pretty
1:37.1	chuffed really to be involved in this because at least his PhD super went on to win the Shore
1:41.9	prize which is hugely prestigious as a result.
	...

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