[ExI] More FRB News

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jul 5, 2019 at 9:46 PM Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> wrote:

*> Congratulations on your recent retirement, John.*


Thanks.


>
> *> As an electrical  engineer, signal processing is one of your fortes so
> would you care to  opine as to what causes FRBs? *


I really don't know. There are plenty of theories but they're all pretty
wild involving very exotic stuff. One involves White Holes:

Fast Radio Bursts and White Hole Signals
<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.4031.pdf>

Another idea involves a very rapidly rotating neutron star of more than 2.2
solar mass but less than 2.7,  normally such a thing would collapse into a
Black Hole but not if its spinning fast enough; however its powerful
magnetic field would gradually slow it down and when it reached a critical
point it would collapse and form a Black Hole and maybe produce a radio
pulse. But of course something like that couldn't repeat and at least 2
FRB's do.

Another idea for the cause involved the decay of hypothetical Dark Matter Axion
Miniclusters, but of course even if they exist they couldn't repeat either:

Fast Radio Bursts and Axion Miniclusters <https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.3900>

Yet another weird idea involve superconducting cosmic strings, maybe that
could repeat:

Superconducting cosmic strings as sources of cosmological fast radio
bursts    <https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.10956>
I wouldn't be surprised if we're dealing with 2 different phenomena that
require 2 different explanations, one for FRB's that repeat and one for
FRB's that don't. As I said I don't know what causes them but I'm pretty
confident sometime in the next few years we'll figure it out.


> > *Frequencies in 111 MHz range are used for aircraft navigation in the
> US*


I don't think FRB's are caused by ET if that's what you mean.


> > but are there any known non-technological sources of that frequency?
>

We know of lots of things in nature that can produce radio waves, but not
in a single burst at that enormous intensity (the sun's 80 year energy
output) compressed into a radio burst lasting just a 1/1000 of a second
with no corresponding optical Xray or Gamma Ray emissions. So whatever it
turns out to be it will be something we didn't know about before, that's
why they're so interesting.

 John K Clark
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