The Mystery of Fast Radio Bursts

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The hardest to explain of these fast radio bursts are the ones that repeat. They saw us big flash. And they're nothing. They didn't see any other signals from that direction. Until just a few weeks ago, it ended up being the oldest fast radio burst ever to be detected. Hello and welcome to the Supermassive Podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society. With me, science journalist Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smithist. Now, for all of you listening last month, I can confirm that we have actually decided on an episode topic. Finally, it's the end of the year. Okay. And this month, it's all about mysterious blasts of energy in space called fast radio bursts. And as always, Dr. Robert Massey, the Deputy Director of the Royal Astronomical Society is here. So, Robert, aside from these fast radio bursts being a bit of a mystery, what are they? Yeah, exactly. That's a great question. They're a bit of a mystery. What are they? Well, we can say what they're characterized by. So they're bursts of radio waves that are very short lived and they are last anything from even a fraction of a millisecond, a fraction of a thousandth of a second, 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 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 UK, actually, who happened to be at Manchester at the same time as I was in the early 1990s, Duncan Lorimer. He's in West Virginia with his PhD student, David Narkovich. You must have been pretty chuffed ready to be involved in this because at least his PhD super went on to win the shore prize, which is usually prestigious as a result. And they're mostly, I say absolutely mostly, but typically billions of light years away, although there seems to be one that was originating in our galaxy. They're really powerful. They give out as much energy in a thousandth of a second as the sun does in three days. So that is one point two billion billion billion joules for those of you who believe in those units. And but of course, you know, by the time the signal reaches the earth from a distance of three billion light years, you're talking about something which is described as a thousand times less powerful than a mobile phone on the moon being, you know, being detected on the earth. So the really weak by the time they get to us, they're also found all over the sky. And that's a characteristic which says that we think they're beyond the galaxy because if they were if they were distributed along the Milky Way in the sky, we think that's something originating in our own galaxy. They're not. They're all over the sky. So they're either they would either be very close, which is really unlikely or very distant, which we think is mostly the case. And we don't really know what they are. So the mystery holds, you know, they relate a bit to the weird stars we talked about last time. So very magnetically powerful neutron stars or magnetars or maybe supernovae as they collapse into black holes in there might even be thousands happening every day that we just can't detect. So there are probably a lot of these things very short lived. We're not quite sure what they are yet. I look I don't know. This is something about fast radio burst. Like every time I sit in a talk from someone studying them, it feels like they really are just sort of working on this. Like who don't it mystery? You know, there's kind of like the gamma ray burst of our generation, you know. So anyway, cheers, Robert. And we'll catch up with you later on the show for some questions. And of course, this month's Stargazing Tips. OK, so we know they're elusive. But what else do we know about fast radio bursts, also known as FRBs? And where did they come from? I spoke with Dr. Stuart Ryder from Macquarie University in Australia. Who detects them? I personally reckon fast radio bursts are where it's at. And the talk quite recently, all we knew about fast radio bursts was in the name. OK, so they are fast. So these are signals coming from somewhere in outer space that last only a few thousandth of a second. And it was only relatively recently where they had the technology to even listen with radio telescopes that fast in order to realize that there were signals that short in duration. Radio, because to date, we've only ever detected these objects at radio wavelengths. And in fact, their emission doesn't even fill all of the radio band in most cases. And bursts, because as the name implies, it's a short pulse of radiation. The majority of which we never see another burst coming from that location again, except for a few, maybe less than 10%, which we do see repeat bursts, but with no regularity to them, no period that we can associate with it. Just on that description alone, you were saying, well, what are these things? How can we have objects that are so brief in duration? What that tells us is that the object that emits them must be extremely compact. Because if the source of these fast-rotated bursts were something like the size of the sun, just it takes light more than a second across the diameter of the sun. So it can't be anything as big as the sun. Well, that's what I wanted to ask is, like, what is our best idea of where they come from? Or is that just a big question mark over everyone's heads? Well, it's certainly not resolved. Right now, the leading candidate for the origin of these fast-rotated bursts are what we call magnetars. Now, magnetars probably don't mean much to many of your listeners either. There are also the rare and recent phenomena themselves, but basically what they are, I presume most people have heard of a neutron star. So a neutron star is a very dense state of matter. It's typically the leftover remnant of a core collapse supernova explosion. If it was much much bigger than that, it might even collapse to a black hole, in which case, becomes interesting for other reasons. But these neutron stars we know a bit about because many of them are what we call pulsars. We know that they spin very fast. They're very compact. They're typically only a few kilometers across, in other words, the size of a city. And yet they can still contain more than a sun's worth of mass, so extremely dense state of matter. And they can be rotating at tens to thousands of times per second. And if they do that, a lot of energy has been funneled out by their very strong magnetic field, pushed out along the polar regions. And if this spinning object happens to line up with our line of sight, it's a bit like a lighthouse. We'll get this burst of radiation and then a shot while later we'll get another one. Then exactly the same period later we'll get another pulse and so on. So these neutron stars, in many cases, are the pulsars. And a magnetar is simply a super magnetic version of a neutron star. So when did we first see them? Now, interestingly, the field of fast radio bursts didn't even exist before 2007. No one knew about these things. No one was even looking for them. But some of our radio astronomers here in Australia, they were looking through some very old Parkes radio telescope data that had been taken back in 2001, in fact. And people thought they'd looked through it pretty thoroughly for evidence of new pulsars that hadn't been picked up in previous surveys. But what they found in this Parkes data from 2001 wasn't a regular pulse from a pulsar. They saw it as big flash and then nothing. They didn't see any other signals from that direction, but it was so bright. They thought, well, it's got to be real. And so they put this object, this result into the journal Nature. And of course, there are a lot of skepticism. Well, how do you know it's real? We've only seen one. It's too bright to be outside of our own galaxy because nothing when you could be that luminous. It took a fair while before people began to accept these were real. It wasn't helped by the fact that a few years later, there was a case where some of these fast-rotary bursts were being found with a Parkes radio telescope always around lunchtime every day. And they couldn't work out why that would be the case until they discovered that people had been opening microwave ovens without waiting for them to finish. And as they did that, this produced a signal that looked remarkably like a fast-rotary burst. So that didn't help. But never mind. Eventually, fast-rotary bursts were being discovered at other telescopes, including the now collapsed Arecibo telescope, the Green Bank telescope and other facilities. So there was no longer a Parkes only phenomenon. And since then, we've gone on to find hundreds, thousands of them now, but they are still not a completely solved problem. Yeah, quite, quite elusive. So what can they tell us? What can fast radio burst tell us about our universe and, you know, put us into context? Yeah, that's a great question. One of the strange things about fast-rotary bursts is that even though we don't yet fully understand what causes them, it turns out they're incredibly useful for telling us about the universe. Let me explain. The thing about a fast-rotary burst is the main plies. It's a signal that lasts only a few thousandth of a second and then shuts off. Now, when a signal like that, which is like a pulse, when that travels through space to us, it will pass through dust, gas, clouds, things like that. And being radio waves, they just pass right through almost unaffected. But if there is any hot gas along the way, and particularly hot enough to be ionized, that is the electrons have been stripped off atoms by supernova shock waves or nearby bright stars and so forth. When that pulse passes through that ionized medium, an interesting phenomenon happens called dispersion. That is, the pulse coming at the lower frequencies gets slowed down relative to the high frequencies. And the more of this ionized material that the pulse has to pass through to get to us on Earth, the more stretched out that signal becomes. So when you think about it, the signal that we ultimately receive at our telescope, that has information about space between us and the origin of the object encapsulated in that if we could decode it. So for instance, we could maybe figure out how much of that ionized material is there out in space. But to do that, we would have to know how far away the burst started. For that, we would need to know which galaxies they come from. And that has been one of the biggest challenges in fast radio burst research. And really only recently, there would be no able to find ways around it. This might be too tricky a question, but let's see. What is our best bet of what's going on in say if it is these fast radio bursts are from a magnetar? What is that mechanism that means that we get this big sort of pulse of radio waves? Yeah, that's a good question. As we used to say for a long time, there were more theories about what causes fast radio bursts than the word no one fast radio burst. That was the case for the first decade or so. Funny enough, people had when you when you pressed our theorist colleagues for suggestions that no shortage of ideas. So for instance, you know that we've seen pictures of the Sun quite wrestling. The Sun, because it was a relatively well behaved star, but it goes through these cycles of sunspots and solar activity over 11 years. And we're currently going through the peak of another solar maximum. And at that point, you see lots of sunspots. You see lots of solar flares. You see evidence for the magnetic fields on the sun where these field lines get tangled and twisted up. And eventually they snap. And when they do that, they release enormous amounts of energy and charged particles that within a few days reach us, may reach us here on Earth and give rise to these spectacular aurora that many people hopefully would have seen earlier this year, I think May and again on October. Absolutely. So imagine that type of phenomena where the magnetic fields twisted and broken up and releasing energy, but scaled, well, in this case, scaled down to a much more compact object like a magnetar. But in terms of the magnetic field strength, scaled up by factors of a billion. And you can maybe begin to conceive of a mechanism where you could deliver or unleash incredible amount of energy in a short space of time. The details are still very much to be worked out. But that seems to be the prevailing model that most people can live with. Others have suggested, well, it could even be things like asteroids crashing onto the surfaces of neutron stars. Because, you know, that's the sort of phenomena that probably wouldn't repeat very often. They might explain why most FRBs, fast-rope births, are only ever seen once. But, you know, maybe there are families of these asteroids that sort of come crashing down in a semi-random manner. All those things are open. We still have people claiming they might even be evidence for extraterrestrials, although that's the least likely explanation at the moment. But who can say for sure? But for now, we'll stick with the magnetar hypothesis, because at least we can do calculations with that and try and develop some understanding around it. And we're going to hear more about the oldest fast radio burst with Stuart in a moment. So, Becky, outside of magnetars or extraterrestrials? Little green men. Are there any other ideas about where these fast radio bursts might come from? Or are magnetars the strongest theory? Yeah, I mean, there's still technically not a generally accepted theory of what fast radio bursts are. But I think magnetar really is the front runner, especially after the detection of FRB 200428 back in 2020, which was actually a fast radio burst thought to be from inside our own Milky Way galaxy, which we had never detected before. And it was traced back to magnetar. So that really is why that's the front-leading theory, but with just sort of, you know, one data point. It doesn't exactly make a full theory yet. That really is sort of a hypothesis. You know, but it could be that there's maybe not just one process that generates these fast radio bursts. There's people have been talking about this, maybe many processes that could do this. And so, yes, of course, we've talked about supernova. It could be like merging neutron stars or merging black holes, or maybe even like it's the collapse of a pulsar like down into a black hole as well when a neutron star gets too heavy. And then you've got like really exotic explanations like is it to do with cosmic strings and axions and all this kind of stuff. So I think what's really interesting though is that the hardest to explain of these fast radio bursts are the ones that repeat. Yeah. That we detect these fast radio bursts all the time coming from this one place and they're not just one-offs. And so a one-off, like if you think about it, okay, well, collapsing neutron star or collapsing supernova, that would make sense it being a one-off, right? But then these things are repeating. So that brings us back to magnetars, etc., etc. But then there are some people that argue that all fast radio bursts might repeat. We just haven't said the long enough to see them repeat yet. And that would obviously, if that would happen, it would rule out this idea of a collapse of something down because then you wouldn't get anything more from it afterwards. So, so many ideas and it's why it's still such a young field, you know, like the first one was only detected, you know, less than 20 years ago. So there's still so many unanswered questions. And I feel like every research paper, you know, I say this is true of all science, but especially fast radio bursts, every research paper that answers one question raises about 10 new ones. Exactly. And I think that's what's so exciting about fast radio bursts because it does feel so new that you're like, I know that if the answer is we just don't know, like, okay, it gets repetitive, but at the same time, that's really exciting. I think that's exciting. I would say to people like if you're a real true crime fan, but you want to become an astrophysicist, maybe you're working fast radio bursts. Okay. And so what are some of the biggest or the most prominent telescopes that are used to detect fast radio bursts? I mean, yeah, all the big single dish radio telescopes have been involved in detections over the years. So like the original Lorimer burst, you know, back in 2007, that was detected by the Parks Radio Observatory, at least in data from Parks a few years earlier, that's in New South Wales in Australia. People might know it as, you know, the dish as people call it. It's a 64 meter wide telescope, which very famously was used to receive the live television images of the Apollo 11 moon landings as well. So, you know, really rich history there. But then also, you know, you've got the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia, the GBT, that's detected a few Arecibo in Puerto Rico as well, detected a few before it sadly collapsed a few years ago. Do you remember that? Is he after the hurricanes? That was so sad. Yeah. So, you know, the big, big classic radio dishes are always going to detect something like this. But the real workhorse of this field now is the Chime radio telescope. So that stands for the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, which is up in British Columbia in Canada. And amazingly, this wasn't designed to do fast radio burst studies, right? Of course it wasn't. It wasn't in every industry. So, it's so wonderful that astronomy could live together with Blue Sky Science, right? It was designed to do cosmology and answer like, why is the universe expanding? And it was designed to, you know, look at things emitting radio light in the Milky Way. And to do this, they were like, we'll just do a big survey of the sky every night with the Chime telescope. Now, these big like cylinders or like half cylinders, always like looking like, like skateboarding, is it a ramp or half pipe? That's what they look like, half pipes, right? And they're just sort of letting the sky move over them every night and taking the survey of what they see. Of course, it turns out if you do that every single night, it's really helpful for detecting things that weren't there before. And things that do just burst randomly and happenstantly. So, I mean, before Chime, we knew a few tens, maybe hundreds of fast radio bursts, but then in 2021 alone, Chime was like, yeah, we detected 500 of these things. So, I changed. Yeah. And so, to be honest, like, I knew Chime was running. And, you know, I knew it was just going all the time or whatever and everything. And in my head, I had the number of fast radio bursts that we knew as being, you know, tens and hundreds. And I was sat in a seminar the other day in Oxford Physics when someone started giving a talk on fast radio bursts and went, and this person went, well, as we know, we now know of over a thousand fast radio bursts. And I was like, we're in the thousands. What happened? You know, I used that email. Sorry. So, Chime really has been, you know, sort of the forerunner of getting these huge sort of populations of fast radio bursts. And that's really what's going to help us crack this problem of what's producing them. Because the more you have, the more statistics you have, we can work out is there multiple processes or is there a single process. So, Chime really going to crack this case wide open. When it comes to detecting fast radio bursts, astronomers named them after the year, the month and the day on which they were discovered. And then they give it a letter depending on whether it's the first, second, third or whatever burst. So, Stuart told me about one that he detected with his team, FRB 20202-0610A, the first fast radio burst reported on the 10th of June, 2022. And until just a few weeks ago, it ended up being the oldest fast radio burst ever to be detected. Now, compared with the 50 odd bursts that we had found with the Australian SKA pathfinder, the ASCAP telescope, this one had the highest dispersion measure, as we call it, that is amount of that stretching of the pulse across frequency of any of the bursts that we had found up until that point. So, that was a hint that that pulse must have travelled through the largest amount of this ionised material and presumably therefore the largest amount of space and the largest distance and the furthest back in time. And it turned out based on the stretching of the emission lines from that spectrum, it was 1.016 redshift. Wow, we got a redshift one that that light or that radio light from that burst had travelled to us for almost 8 billion years. Wow. The universe is 13.7 something billion years old. So, that means that this burst had travelled for more than half the age of the universe to reach us. But if it had arrived just 20 years earlier, no one would have been listening for it. That's amazing. And that makes you think of how well there are the signals that we just wouldn't have detected, perhaps. Oh, sure there are. Based on the rates of which we are now finding fast-radioburse, we believe that this on any given day, there's at least 10,000 fast-radioburse arriving here on Earth, not all of which we can currently detect. But nevertheless, you know, these are not a rare phenomena. They're actually quite common, but we've really only just latched onto them in the last 10, 20 years. It's been a real wild ride. What was that feeling like when you first come across that signal when you sort of done the numbers? You're like, no, surely not. Yeah, well, that was the first... No, I've screwed this up again. When I first looked at the result, I couldn't believe it. And just for a little while, I didn't want to tell my collaborators about it. I wanted to know, I think, I've got a secret. Yeah. The only one who knows that we've got the most distant and the wretched one, FRB. That was pretty exciting. But again, I just thought, well, I'll just sit on this result for a while because it's just nice to think. This is really cool. This is what I get out of bed for in the morning to do this, make these occasional breakthroughs. How are you detecting these? And what are you looking at when you're making these observations? In order to get a good handle on the distance to the galaxy and the amount of space that this burst of travel through, the more distant galaxies, the space is expanding faster at those distances, and the light gets more and more stretched out. There are two emission lines that are quite close together in wavelength and very distinctive pattern. So these oxygen two line, which are normally in the very blue part of the spectrum, I end up having to look in the very red part of the optical spectrum just to see where they landed. And similarly, the hydrogen alpha line, which is normally in that red part of the spectrum, was pushed out into the infrared part. And so those are key, a bit like DNA fingerprints of a galaxy. If I see those features, I know that it's a star forming galaxy because it gives rise to these strong emission lines. And that means even if the galaxy itself might be relatively faint by astronomy standards, those so-called emission lines, as it implies, they stick out above that background and they could be relatively quick and easy to get a good measure of. Indeed, as we get to into the realm in the next decade or so, when we're going to be finding hundreds of fast-rotary bursts every day, there's no way that we'll be able to get a spectrum for every single one of them. And so we're already beginning to plan ahead for how we're going to really capitalize on the fantastic value that these bursts have for cosmology, especially at those larger distances, if we can't actually get an exact measurement of their distances. Well, it turns out, if we get hundreds or thousands of them, even if any one of them is not particularly well constrained, but as an ensemble, we can do good statistics on those and hopefully get to the answers that we want, even if we can't do it as accurately as we can currently do for one object at a time. Yeah. And then for me, I would just love to know what is next for the field, because what excites you in going forward with studying fast-radio bursts? Yeah. Well, in fact, I've just come back from a conference that was held in Thailand just three weeks ago. And somewhat to my disappointment, I was shown a spectrum from a rival team who had found a fast-rotary burst with an even higher dispersion than the object that we had. And they had gone off to try and confirm its distance. And in fact, their redshift is even greater than one I had. But we haven't given up. We had this weird fast-rotary burst that we weren't able to see its host galaxy in the best ground based telescopes. So we decided, heck, we'll go for a break. We applied for time on the James Webb Space Telescope. And we were lucky enough to be granted a few hours with that wonderful machine. We actually got an image of that location sent back to us about a month ago. And somewhat to our relief, there is definitely a faint smudge not far from the FRB's location. So, whew, there is something there. But I've got to tell you, it's really faint. And so although we've now requested a follow-up spectrum, and we've got our fingers crossed that maybe there'll be enough photons, enough emission lines that this object might indeed turn out to be the most distant than the one we heard about just three weeks ago. Thank you to Dr. Stuart Ryder from Macquarie University. Listen up, Landscapers. Jimmy Bullard here, your juice and landscaping coach. And at Juicen, we've always got you covered. Right now, get Teralis Dallas Porcelain from 22 quid per square meter. Marshall's Drive Set Tequila from 27lb 20lb per square meter. Plus great prices on roll-on turf. So whether it's patios or driveways, get the job done right. Visit juicen.co.uk or your local branch. Juicen, landscaping made easier because the jobs are hard enough. It's the biggest football tournament ever this summer and the sun, a world cup for it. Are you up for following midnight kickoffs during midnight feats? And in-depth analysis, wherever you are. Are you up for expert takes that you can pass off as your own? Yeah, your knowledge of Cura Sal's midfield is on surpassed. Are you up for the biggest world cup ever, all in one place? Get the sun up for the latest updates, reports and analysis round the clock. The sun, we're World Cup for it. This is the supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smithers and the wonderful science journalist Izzy Clark. So considering the festive season has arrived, has barreled towards us so quickly, we thought we'd do our usual gift guide for the astronomy lover in your life. So team, what presents would you recommend? Let's start with you, Iz. I think this year I'm going for experiences. That's the general vibe of my Christmas presents, Izzy, I think. And I was looking around, so Chris Hadfield is doing a talk. It's called A Journey Into The Cosmos and he's visiting various venues across the UK. So that's going on between, I mean, they're going to have to wait a bit. It's going on between the 8th and the 22nd of June, but... There's some of the most fun presents, right? It's like you've got something to avoid too. Exactly, right? You know, in the depths of January, like me, you know. Got a mini Christmas in June, lovely. Oh, and this is something I've really got my eye on just for myself and my friends. We have like a little physics girls WhatsApp group. Nice. And there's the astronomy photographer of the year exhibition at the Royal Museum's Greenwich in London. Even better, it's free. So that might be a bit handy if people are feeling the pinch this year. But for me personally, I'm just hoping that someone gets me a C-Star S50 that we talked about last year. I just look at them like... Oh, shall I buy one? And then no doubt people message us on Instagram and like, I've got one. Look at this amazing photo that I've taken. I'm like, well, this is really making me want one even more. So... And I'm making her jealous at all. Yeah, what about you, Robert? What would you recommend? Well, I mean, and if anybody wants to buy you a C-Star, then make an email podcast. Or a C-Star themselves. Exactly, we can arrange that. I'm just going to clip this off and just send it to them directly. Exactly. So, hey, I'm going to go with the binoculars. I was thinking about this. I think you look, you know, everybody wants to go and look at the sky. So many people ask about small telescopes, which are just a little bit harder to get into. But also like, who has the space for a telescope? But sometimes... Exactly. A big mount for the rest of it. Exactly. So you need a bit of space for a star. But binoculars are portable. They're very small. You can spend quite a range of money. It's fair to say, you know, you can spend 50 quid and get something really good. You can spend a thousand quid and get something very good indeed or even more. But the point is that, you know, it's not unreachable. And it just, that cost difference usually just reflects the quality of the optics. But even at the low end, they can be pretty good. So if you've got a lot of money to spend, you can also play around. I don't know, either of you have, I'm sure, tried these. You get these image stabilizing binoculars, Canon makes some and you press a button and the image miraculously stays still from your handshake. So actually for astronomy, they're quite good. You know, if you want to look up a star cluster or something, you press that and you just see more as well because, you know, the thing is holding stills. That I'd recommend having tried them. I don't know them myself, but I always enjoy using them. And you don't need a tripod so much then. Also like... You're looking for comets or something like that. Even if you put a cut, I like binoculars on a tripod. As soon as my eyes touch it, they still shake. It's like my entire mind just goes... Yeah, and it's like holding stills on your own house, making a tripod is exactly right. You know, setting it up and that's more storage space as well, of course. But I mean, having said that, you know, the low end, you can get good pairs even from companies like Celestron and Helios and so on down to the few tens of pounds like 10 by 50 binoculars standard thing. Quite affordable. They'll show you a lot of the things we talk about each time, you know, the Nebulae star clusters, comets, craters on the moon, all the good stuff that you want to see and you might not have done already. So, you know, if you haven't got a telescope and you haven't got space for a telescope or the money for a telescope, then do consider it. Yeah, my binoculars I got for Christmas a few years ago were around the 100 quid mark and they had even like a coating on the lenses for astronomy in terms of like, you know, sort of like filtering out street lamps and stuff like that. So I use them to see the comet a few weeks back and they were great. I highly recommend binoculars. They're just so much more flexible. You can take them with you on holiday, you know, you can look at Booty Bird watching and look at landscapes, all of those great things. So, you know, so, no, definitely good. Sports, concerts. Exactly. Yeah, they're kind of, yeah, they're a catch-all. Is that where you can see Taylor Swift from a distance? That's how I see Taylor Swift, yeah. Although I'm too sure I also need like a box to stand on. But yeah. You can use the box to come in, it's right. Yeah, that's an accessory pack. So, it's like, Becky's Christmas, I said it's an accessory pack with it. And actually, that reminds me of an email that we've got from Addy in Canada who said that... Is it about Taylor Swift? Yeah, it's not about Taylor Swift. It's actually about binoculars. Surprise, surprise, Becky. And he said, I've been on a mission to binge the entire supermassive catalogue and start gazing sections at the end of each episode. Inspired me to buy a set of binoculars and I even managed to capture the pliades from my backyard just using my phone. It's not the clearest though, but hoping to see Andromeda one day. Nice. They've attached the photo and it looks amazing, it's great. I saw that, it's really good, isn't it? Really, really nice. So, Becky, what's on your list? Nothing's better than a good book at Christmas for me, just curling up after Christmas is all the kvuffles done and then I just... My nice little quiet time. If I can guess, I gave a shout out to DK's Cosmos, which I wrote the four-word form because I think it's great. It's just the ultimate coffee table book, right? It goes from everything from the solar system all the way through to the most assistant things in the universe and it's got some beautiful J.D.B.S.T. images in there as well now. It's books like that that just inspired me into science. So, if anyone's looking for that kind of inspirational book for someone this year, I would definitely say Cosmos from DK, which is great. There's also a great new biography of Roger Penrose that's just come out as well. Yeah. Did you see this? Because, I mean, for those who don't know, Penrose was the guy who worked with Hawking on developing like the maths of black holes and singularities and things like that. So, that book is called The Impossible Man by Patch and Bars and it's a really interesting read. Like, if you love the sort of like humanity side of science and sort of like the floor genius kind of aspect of science, then it's a really interesting read. And then also, the little book of Cosmic Catastrophes by Sarah Webb as well. I saw this. It's just, I think it would be a great little stocking filler, you know? It's a really fun read, maybe for a teen or something like that. And then, of course, no one would say no to a night sky guide, right? Like, I mean, even though we know the night sky, still knowing what's coming in 2025 is very, very helpful. So, The Night Sky Almanac for 2025 by Red Miller Topolovich, Storm Dunlop and Will Tyrion looks beautiful. I saw it in Blackwells the other day and I was just sort of like drooling over it. And I had to be like dragged out of the store like, come on. No, there is something magical about going into a bookstore just before Christmas and you get the smell of books. So, it's a professor, you're like, which one shall I buy? And who else am I buying for? And you're like, oh, you know, Sevens Over Love This is like, but I would also love that. You should just let it be like one for them, one for me. One for me. The pile of books is bigger than my flat. Yeah, but maybe if you buy enough books, you could construct some sort of telescope enclosure into a flat telescope. Perfect, multi-faceted, great. Anyway, we'll put all of those recommendations in the episode description. So, you have links and stuff to see that. And if you do get any, you know, like, spacey Christmasy presents, like, do let us know. Because we love to live vicariously through other people. Yes, absolutely. Okay, so let's get onto some questions about fast radio bursts. Ginger Hulk on Instagram asks, can we start calling them furbies? It's about FRB, IES. And I am very much saying yes to that one. I just hope there's an astronomer somewhere now that says that like they're alert system, you know, for like any time there's an FRB detected with like a furby sound, but you know, the little laugh they used to do like, make me crazy. Yeah, there's sort of demonic laugh, which is terrifying. Yeah, but, love me, babe. Okay, so onto some other questions. Robert Helen G on Instagram asks, are fast radio bursts something that we need to add to the dangerous things in space? Oh, Helen, Helen, I mean, I think honestly, you know, particularly with a demonic laugh, you know, if you're going to have to learn from these things, then absolutely no. I mean, probably not. They're mostly very, very far away. Even the closest one was what, 30,000 light years away. The intensity of it wasn't, you know, by the time it's troubled, that was not that high. And they're very, very short lived. So that, all of that helps. And I think they'd have to be super close to do any damage with the intents of light years at least. I'd probably be more worried about things like a nearby supernova. There's not much risk of either or gamma ray burst. And again, there's a quite rare event, you know, we're not really detecting them in our galaxy so that you can probably rest easy. The only thing I would say is I'd be a bit more confident if we knew exactly what they were. That would really help. You know, if you want to reassure people knowing what they are is helpful, but I'm not going to lose too much sleep over this. Okay, that's good to know. And Becky Craig on email asks, what's the nearest FRB that's been discovered? Oh, well, Robert stole my thunder if you're paying attention in the last class answer. But Craig, I want to answer you anyway. We spoke about FRB 200428 before, right? That was the one that was detected in our own Milky Way galaxy that we think is coming from a magnetar. That's what it's been traced back to. So that magnetar is 30,000 light years away. And so that's what we think is the closest one. But you know, there is still a chance that it just happens to be a background foreground alignment thing, although the sort of amplitude, the sort of brightness of the signal we detected suggested it was in the Milky Way as well. But then if you're thinking about the closest extra galactic fast radio burst, and that would be FRB 200120E, they really need to work on the name. Wow. You know, they make sense to the big boy in Shine, I'm sure. That was detected in 2021 by Chime and that's in the Galaxy Messier 81, which is the most gorgeous spiral galaxy you ever did see. Honestly, next chance you get, Google it, you'll not be disappointed. And that galaxy is around 12 million light years away. So is what Robert was saying, like, we don't need to worry about these things like that so far away that, yeah, we don't need to sleep at night. Okay, fine. And you can see the M81 with the peripinoculars. Yes, you can. There we go. There are some major, it's not too hard. Oh my God, cue all of the photos, which I'm very... The ones with those sea stars. Oh, I thought I was just kidding. No! And Robert, Yasmin has a message to ask, how do astronomers know they've detected a fast radio burst? Can they be confused with other signals? Yeah, it's a really good question, Yasmin. I think the answer is, it's like so many things, it's the characteristic of the signal that matters. So they're very short lived. That's a starting point. They don't usually repeat all that there are some exceptions and they're really powerful. So those things together, these point sources that have a characteristic spectrum and they emit in such a way that the highest frequencies come first and then the lower frequencies after that. All of those things combined together to remove sources of confusion. Unless, of course, we're talking about that microwave oven incident back in 2010. I did find the paper which it was soberly called identifying the source of peritons at the fast radio telescope. Oh, peritons, what a flashback. It's in the monthly notes, is the RIS, but actually, so yeah, you can look it up and see that. But yeah, realistically, most of the time it should be possible to find them and distinguish them. Amazing. Okay. Well, thank you to everyone who sent in questions. And if you want to send us more for a future episode, then please do. You can email podcast at ras.ac.uk or find us on Instagram at supermassivepod. So, Robert, let's finish as usual with some stargazing. So what can we see in the night sky? Yeah, so look, it would absolutely in winter in the northern hemisphere now. So yeah, you know, I think noticeably, I'm sure I'm speaking, Robert, and you can find that winter starts on the 21st of December this year. The meteorological winter's on the first of December. I'm not going to have these. We're going to have these on this year. But it's certainly cut all the way. So yeah, so it means that Ryan is back, which is the really lovely winter constellation near the brightest one in the sky, basically two first magnitude stars, really obvious later in the evening, the belt, and then four bright stars around that, including Rige, which is blue, and Beetlejuice, which is red. And you can even, I was sent a photo by a friend of mine with a mobile phone and her photo showed the colors of those stars. So even a mobile phone is enough to show that Beetlejuice is a bit red and Orion is quite blue. Can you see what your eyes in the dark sky, sir? Absolutely. But you know, it just shows how well that they stand out. And yeah, again, actually a pair of binoculars really pulls out colors in stars too in bright ones. So do look at it. It's always a fabulous sight and you can also find things like the Orion Nebula and more generally, a lot of other faint stars in the same region too. So, you know, do enjoy the view. This December though, it's also really good for planets. So we've got Saturn still around in the evening sky, but it's now very thin ring. Sorry, Becky, get disappearing next year to, you know, real sadness, but it'll be back. And at sunset, Venus is really dazzling in the evening sky. And if you have a small telescope in this case, you'll see it looks like a half moon phase. That'll show it slowly shrink over the month as it gets closer to the earth and it gets bigger too. And there's also nice pairing on the fourth and fifth of December. It'll be close to the crescent moon in the sky. So, you know, that's a good photo target in the east. Jupiter is really pretty much its best. It's an opposition on the seventh of December. So that means that it's opposite the sun in the sky and it's closest to the earth. You know, really lovely target, very, very obvious. Get again, get a pair of binoculars. You'll see those four bright big Galileo moons. It's so bright at the minute. Can I just kind of like, it gets the point where even I don't believe that it's Jupiter anymore because it's also so low in the evening, right? When you're sort of like out and about and you sort of notice things when it's dark. So I keep thinking it's like the light on top of a crane or there's like a house on a hill in the distance somewhere. And it's just, no, it's Jupiter. It's Jupiter. It's so bright. And that's it. Because when you're looking at the night sky, I like, that is where Jupiter would be. But it's so bright that I always have to get some hurry about just to like check. This is Jupiter. Yes. I'll wait for an email from a Becky Smithers saying, is this aliens? Yeah. It's a dear podcast. No, you're quite right though. It does really stand out in particular when it's low early in the evening. You might be a plane or something like that. But the drain thing is. Do you remember that story of that person who rang the police? The one of the police thought it was a drone chasing them somewhere in the US, right? But it was Jupiter. It was Jupiter. It was the last time it was the opposition. That's how bright it is. Please don't phone us about that. But it's, yeah, I mean, it's exactly, you know, and it'll be really good over the next few months. And then finally anyway, but for planets, we've got Mars is on the scene too. And that's getting brighter and it'll be at its best. I think January, February. It's not as good as it was a few years ago, but still, if you've got a decent telescope, you know, you can see a small disk and dark markings. And actually that always to me illustrates just how hard it is to see things on it from the earth. You know, people imagine Mars is like this world that you just point this telescope and you see all this stuff. It's really, really difficult. It's a really small target on the whole. However, and the final thing then is this month's obviously the solstice. So it does mean the shortest day if you're up here in the Northern Hemisphere, a low sun during the day, but also a really high full moon, which is called the cold moon unimaginatively or the moon before you, which is a bit more romantic in England, Saxon. And that's going to be on the 15th of December. So what I would say is, or even, you know, the day before the day after, go out and have a look the day before the day, after all the day itself, it's clear and just genuinely marvel at how bright the landscape is with the winter full moon. It's really high up. You know, you can, you're going to be able to wander around your garden without a torch. It's not a problem, you know, even if you live in an area with no lights, you'll look out and you think you see the whole moonlit landscape. And that already photographic as well, you know, just shows you how much natural light. If it's frosty, oh, it'd be beautiful. Yeah. Sparkling. Sparkling. The only downside this year is it's going to interfere with the Gemini to meet your show, which is the same night, the 15th of December. So if you're out, you'll see a few. You won't see quite as many because of the full moon, but go out and enjoy the view. It's absolutely pretty. It's, you know, winter full moon is a really quite special. Oh, I'm going to put that in my diary. Do you know what I also put in the dark in my diary the other day was the planet alignment on the 25th of January. So I'll be ready. Spoiler for next year. Exactly. Well, that's it for this month and we'll be back next time with our final episode of the year on the scientific search for extra terrestrial life. Yeah, exactly. And there'll be a bonus episode in a few weeks time as well. So I'll take on more of your questions, you know, because you just keep sending them. Please keep sending them. Yes, we love them. We will keep asking you because the next line in the script for me is contact us if you've got someone's trying to be at home. It's that super massive pod on Instagram or you can email your questions to podcast.ris.ac.uk. And of course, we will try and cover them in a future episode. But until next time, everybody, happy stargazing. This is Sun App for the latest updates, reports and analysis round the clock. This Sun. We're World Cup for it.