Astronomy by Pratyush Khare

BEIJING, Sept. 9 (Xinhua) -- Chinese astronomers have detected repeated fast radio bursts (FRB) - mysterious signals believed to be from a source about 3 billion light years from Earth - with the largest and most sensitive radio telescope ever built. Scientists detected the signals with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) and they are carefully cross-checking and processing them, according to researchers at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC). FRBs are the brightest bursts known in the universe. They are called "fast" because these blips are very short, only several milliseconds in duration. But there is no reasonable explanation for their origin. The detection of the repeated bursts might help shed light on the origin and physical mechanisms of FRBs, said researchers. Chinese scientists have installed a highly sensitive FRB backend on a 19-beam receiver on the giant telescope, and used it to

That star system, MAXI J1621−501, first turned up on Oct. 9, 2017, in data from the Swift/XRT Deep Galactic Plane Survey as an odd point in space flashing unpredictably with X-rays. That was a sign, researchers wrote in a new paper, of a binary system containing both a normal star and either a neutron star or black hole. Both neutron stars and black holes can create unpredictable X-ray patterns as they absorb matter from their companion stars, but in very different ways. In black holes, as Live Science has previously reported, the X-rays come from  matter accelerating to extreme speeds and generating enormous friction  as it falls toward the gravity well. In neutron stars — superdense corpses of giant stars that exploded but haven't collapsed into singularities — the X-rays come from thermonuclear explosions on their outer crusts. Something is causing atoms to fuse on the outermost parts of these strange stars, releasing enormous energies usually found only deep inside stars (as