"China's Sky Eye" has made new discoveries!

The "China Sky Eye" has made new discoveries! Using the rich data of the "China Sky Eye" FAST, Li Di, a researcher at the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led a team to propose a new analytical framework, the "Pincus-Lyaponov phase diagram", which quantified the randomness and chaos of the burst event, revealing that the time-energy performance of fast radio bursts is fundamentally different from earthquakes and solar flares. This difference challenges the starquake origin of fast radio bursts . Based on the new phase diagram, the team found that the wandering of fast radio bursts in the time-energy binary space is close to the so-called Brownian motion, that is, it shows a high degree of randomness.

The powerful observation capability of FAST, the "Chinese Sky Eye", combined with innovative analysis methods, can deeply characterize the mysterious burst signals in the universe and is expected to eventually reveal their origins. On April 12, the study was published as a cover article in Science Bulletin, a comprehensive journal of the "China Science and Technology Journal Excellence Action Plan".

Fast radio bursts are short, intense bursts of radio waves from deep in the universe. Just as its name suggests, fast radio bursts can release huge amounts of energy in a thousandth of a second, enough to power human society for trillions of years. Fast radio bursts were first discovered in 2007, but until now, people still don't know how these powerful energies are generated.

Scientists speculate that so-called compact objects with extremely high energy density, such as neutron stars or black holes, are likely to be the origin of fast radio bursts. The signal from a neutron star is like a lighthouse, regularly sweeping across the earth and is very stable. If fast radio bursts are also emitted by such objects, can we see the regular occurrence of fast radio burst signals? Unfortunately, in many previous studies, efforts to find fast radio bursts with periods ranging from milliseconds to seconds have failed. This requires us to reconsider the emission method of fast radio bursts.

At the same time, the journal Science Bulletin published a commentary by Professor Zhang Bing of the University of Nevada, who is a theoretical expert in the field of fast radio bursts. He said, " This innovative method has prompted theorists to think deeply about the physical mechanism of the burst phenomenon, and then further apply it to the big data collection of FAST to test the universality of the physical laws it reveals. "

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Source: Science and Technology Daily

Editor: He Tong

Proofreading: Xu Lai, Lin Lin