What are fast radio bursts and what causes them?

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Speaker 1: Hey, Jor, I have a question for you about how you use your microwave. It's about how I am prepared my dinner on it or not. No, this is about whether you wait for it to stop and ding, or whether you impatiently yanked the door open before it's finished. Yeah. I think sometimes I opened it without waiting for it to end. Is that bad? Am I going to get irradiated? It's that dangerous. It's not dangerous to you. Is it dangerous for my pets or my dinner? Everybody in your house is perfectly safe, but you might be ruining the life of some graduate students nearby if they're running a particularly sensitive science experience. Well, they're welcome to come sharing my popcorn. Hi am or hammy cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I always wait for the ding. Well, wait no more, and welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio in which we look around the universe and try to explain it to you. We find crazy, interesting, amazing, mind blowing stuff that scientists hardly understand and try to bring you to that forefront of misunderstanding. That's right, all the weird and unexplained phenomena out there, and also safety tips for your microwave of a usage. That's right. We dove into the details of how microwaves work on a recent episode, but today we're going to talk about how microwaves might ruin everything for science. It is one of these um physics destroys the universe kind of things, like little mic microwaves collapse the Higgs field somehow. No, no, maybe Marcos will save the universe by stymying physics. Right, what if with your microwave and you could stop the LHC from operating? Is that a setting? Maybe I missed that setting? Is it like reheat defrost ruined science? You know? That brings up a good point because microwaves have so many settings that I think probably nobody ever uses, right, only people only ever use them, like the popcorn button and like add one minute button. Yeah. I always wonder if there's like a secret code, you know, like videos. You know how some video games have like special sequence. You can unlock special up, down, down, left, right, A A B B, and all of a sudden, you're playing video games on your microwave. Yeah, there you go. I'm sure, I'm sure, but no, microwaves don't hold secrets to the universe, but they have been known to sty me the progress of physics. And that's what we're gonna be talking about today. Yeah, and it ties into how sometimes you know, how sensitive sometimes science is. That's right. If you want to listen to something which came all the way from the other side of the universe, you have to listen very carefully, and that means you're gonna be listening to tiny little signals from space. And also every signal from Earth nearby is going to be trying to drown that out. So scientists have to get really good at figuring out all the other things that could mimic their signal, all the terrestrial sources of noise. You have to get really good at telling everyone else to turn other cell phones basically, that's right. Scientists are like those grumpy neighbors telling you turn down your music, except they want you to turn down everything. So to the under program, we'll be talking about fast Radio berths or Fast and Mysterious were your birth that's right. What's the official title of these? I think they're called fast Radio bursts, but they are definitely mysterious, and a bunch of listeners have written in and said, please explain fast radio burse to us, So here we are. Are they also furious? That would be pretty pretty good branding Fast and Furious radio berths. No, because then they money to Vin Diesel every single time we mentioned it. That would be a movie, right, that's what should do that. That would be like Fast and the Furious seventeen. They go into a radio telescope and drive it around the telescope. You know, I love those movies because every single one they somehow managed to like one up the previous one. You know, the last one they had a submarine. Here they have like a helicopter with a submarine attached to it, swinging around a rocket ship. It's incredible. Do your physics sense is cringe when you watch these movies? No, No, they usually get the physics pretty pretty much accurate on those movies. You know, there's no science fiction here. It's it's mostly just trajectories and explosions. Yeah, it's pretty accurate. Yeah. So there's something called fast radio waves and there are They are kind of mysterious, right, Nobody knows where they come from. That's right. Nobody knows where they come from, and they're sort of a recent mystery. They were discovered only twelve years ago by a summer student, like an undergrad. Have you ever had this science experience to where you go to do a summer undergraduate project and somebody just says, here, go plow through all this data. Um, maybe as a way to get rid of you, maybe as a way to just keep you busy, um, And nobody ever expects to accomplish anything. Well, this student did. Well. I can't say I've had the experience of being an undergrad scientist. Um, but it's pretty cool to think, yeah, that someone who who's that young can discover something nobody else has done before. Yeah, exactly. And it's cool to think we've discovered something uh as recently as two thousand and seven. Absolutely, And it's just another example of how every time we look out into the universe we find weird stuff. The universe is just chock full of unexplained, really bizarre phenomena, and each of them, each of them is a clue that there's something going on out there that we don't understand, some new type of objects, some new kind of physics, some new kind of life. Who knows, But each one is the universe sending us a message saying there's something here to learn. There's something mysterious in your microwave. Open it, open it right. If you've been cooking that popcorn since two thousand and seven, then you're in trouble. I'm still waiting for it to stop popping. You know, it's still pops every once in a while. Yeah. And the the other lesson to be learned here is that while this was discovered by an undergraduate, his advisor got all the credit for it. The undergrad got no credit. Well, you know, the professor sent him off and said, hey, spend your summer looking through this old data. Maybe you'll find something interesting. And then he came back with this saying, like, look at this huge weird pulse I found. What is that? And now it's named after the professor. Well, he did direct the student to look for it, so you know that's like, uh, that's obviously fair. Yeah right, yeah, like Einstein's supervisor. Right, go be smart. All right, Well, now I get credit for all your discoveries. Well I had never heard of these fast radio burs, much less any fast mysterious radio burs, But we were wondering how many people out there had maybe, may you something that was in the news or something. Daniel went out and asked people on the street if they knew what a fast radio burst was. That's right, several of our listeners were curious about it. But I was wondering, is this something that sort of seeped into the common understanding? Is this a mystery that people think about or have you even heard about? Yeah? So I think for a second, if random scruffy physicists approach you on the street and ask you, hey, what's a fast radio burst? Well, would you say to a microphone. Here's what people had to say. I have heard of it, but I don't know what it is. I've heard of them. I I couldn't tell you about them, but yes, I have heard of them. Uh no, no, I have not. All right, not a lot of people knew about these fast radio birsts. Yeah, pretty much. Zero. I mean some folks claimed have maybe heard of them, but I didn't really quiz them on it. I was being generous, So not a lot of I mean you think that maybe they were lying, like maybe they were they hadn't really heard of it, But they were just trying to sound smart. Yeah, maybe a little bit. You know, somebody talks about some brand new topic in science to you, you might not have long be like, oh, I think I heard about that. I'm not sure. Or maybe it just tickles some memory you had in your mind. Anyway, nobody, what do you think this podcast? Every time? Daniel, I'm just nodding along. Well, you're doing a great job of faking it. So and then most people have never heard of a fast radio burse exactly. And so I hope that those folks out there who have never heard of fast radio burse will be amazed at what they learned today about this crazy, mysterious, amazing signal from the stars. All right, so let's break it down now. So the name of it doesn't sound very complicated. I mean, it's just fast radio bursts. So I think I know what each of those words mean, but together they form something mysterious. Well, you're assuming that physicists have been clear in their naming and that you can sort of you reverse engineer the concept from the name of it. So I'm proud that you have such confidence in our skill. Well, I'm just wondering how they were able to get this through the trademark office, you know, like it's such a generic name, fast radio burs you know, you're right, it's like trademarking um brown table table cloths. You know. I'm not sure it's been um copyrighted or trademarked UM, but you know, for our upcoming movie starring Vin Diesel, then we'll definitely want to get on that. You call it the Fasten the birst tea. Yeah, exactly, No, you're right, it's pretty straightforward. I mean, these are bursts of emissions in the radio spectrum, right, and remember radio waves are just one kind of electromagnetic radiation. You have radio waves down at the long wavelength part of the spectrum, and you've got visible light, you know, you know, hundreds of nanometers, and then you get up to X rays and gamma rays, the very high energies, very small frequencies. So remember what you call it just depends on the frequency of the electromagnetic radiation we're talking about. And radio waves are down at the lower end, meaning that they are low frequency relatively speaking. So these guys have really long wavelengths so have lower frequency, and these kind of radio waves that we're talking about, they're like four hundred megaherts, so fourteen million times the second is the frequency of these waves, yeah, exactly. And you know that's the same kind of frequency as the electromagnetic radiation that's used to send you radio into your car, right, which is why we call them radio waves. All right. There are lots of sources of radio waves in the universe, right, Like black holes make radio waves, the center of galaxies make radio waves, the Sun makes radio waves. You know, Jupiter makes radio wave. Powers make radio waves exactly. Vin Diesel I think has his own radio station now. But there's lots of sources, and there's a huge field of radio astronomy, right, and mostly these things are just sort of like pulsing out continuous radiation. But in two thousand and seven they heard for the first time this fast radio bursts. So burst means like it's not continuous, it's just like it's somebody screaming in space. Right. It's very short lived. That sounds a little horrific. So it's just so fast. Radio burst is just like a quick pulse, like a quick burst of these low frequency light waves radio waves exactly. And by burst we mean like order milliseconds, right, It's not like gamma ray bursts that lasts you know, two seconds or thirty seconds. These are milliseconds, so they're very very brief, which is why they were originally overlooked. You know, when this underground found him, he didn't like hear them for the first time. He went back into old data. He found this like it had already been recorded. The data was just sitting there. Nobody had looked through it and seen this before. It was very short lived, which I guess why I didn't trigger any alarms or anything. And it was just a once, one time event that he discovered. You could listen to these on the radios. I mean like if you had the radio tune to the right frequency, you would hear a little every once in a while. Yeah, you can. You can do radio astronomy using your radio. Right, you can listen to that kind of stuff. Um, you can hear. Some of the static that you hear from radio is radio waves from the Sun or from Jupiter or from the center of the galaxy. Right. Space is filled with this, kidding, and some of them get down to Earth. Yeah, so you can listen to the universe. The sound of the universe is s doesn't have great rhythm the universe is telling you to shut up. You know, this is a burst of energy and it's not that loud. Like, it's not like this was a huge spike that that he noticed. It was a little bit of a blip. You know. Um, it's not not very loud, but it's above the general noise, right, it was large enough to be seen above the just sort of radio noise you get from the Sun or Jupiter, from the center of the galaxy. And it was odd, and so he asked his advisor. He said, you know, what's this? What could make this? And the guy had no idea. You know, we had never seen such a short lived pulse of energy. So this Undergraund was combing through some data and he saw these little blips like all of a sudden, this, uh, the signal at that frequency kind of jumped. Yeah, but just one blip, just one blip, yeah, exactly, and you gotta wonder, like, what is this summer project? You just like gave him a pilot data and said, look through this, see if you find anything. You've never done that, Daniel, I don't do that to my students. No, I give them like supervision. I tell I set them up, I tell them like try this, try that, and just say like that's like saying, go to the basement of the library, figure it out. So if you find anything interesting, you know, you gotta give them some more direction than that. But this kid actually found something amazing. Yeah, maybe you should try it all right, next summer, I'm sending all my students to the basement the library. Just combed through random part of physic data. You might find some new phenomenon named that for you. I'm just gonna print out all the LEDC data into a huge pile and tell them to comb through it. No, so there was this short lived pulse, right, and he didn't understand it. He never seen anything like it before. They were very curious about it, but it was the only one anybody had ever seen. So they started going back and looking through old data to see could they find more? And did they They did, But then they ran into a bit of a snag. See, a lot of people were wondering, like where does this come from? How do you know that this actually comes from space? Right? And it doesn't just come from like some other source of noise, because there's huge numbers of sources of radio waves, right, Like all the radio stations on Earth. Right, so before you can conclude it something it really is astronomical, you have to rule out everything else. And there are maybe at the local radio station, the DJ accidentally hit the bun and created these little yeah, although you know in this frequency range, radio stations don't emit. And you know, radio stations have a certain frequency range that they're allowed to transmit on, and this one in particular was reserved for radio astronomy. Right, so the night the sky is supposed to be quiet in this frequency so that we can listen to the universe. But you know, there are known sources and interference here and there, and nobody had ever seen this kind of thing, so they had to try to sort of track it down. And when they were looking through the old data, they found a bunch of them from this one observatory in Australia, the Park's observatory. What do you mean, like everybody started looking through their old data, or this was done in Australia. Everybody started looking through their old data. But the folks in Australia looked through there and they found a whole bunch of these little blips, and they thought, well, there's no way that these are all astronomical, and because of the way the antenna was pointed, they got a clue that some of these blips might actually be from something nearby, and this cast a huge shadow on the initial discovery. People thought, well, if these blips they're seeing in Australia are just something here on Earth, then one of the chances that the two thousand seven discoveries actually some weird signal from space. Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit more. But first quick break, So what do you mean the way that antenna was pointed, like it was pointing downwards or you know, to my house or somebody's house, or what you mean. The biggest clue to understanding where something comes from is when do you see it? Right? Do you see it when you're pointing at the sky? Do you see it when you're pointing always the same direction on Earth? Or do you see when you're like always pointing at the same thing in the sky, Like if you point your antenna at the same star and then you always see a signal, you wonder or maybe it comes from that star. But if your antenna is if you always see the signal when you're pointed it, like you know, some nearby building, then you wonder if it comes from that building. And so in this case, they had clues from when they saw these signals that it might be coming from something nearby instead of from something in space, because it didn't correlate to any particular direction in space. Oh, I see. So it looks like if you hear voices in your head, no matter which way you're standing or who you're surrounded by, then maybe the voices are not coming from outside of your head. No, that's a perfect analogy. That's a perfect analogy. So they started to worry that maybe some of these things were coming from something nearby. I mean, the guys are not insane, they're not coming from actually inside their head. But they had to try to track this down, and it took them years and years and years, but they finally figured out that one of the sources of these things was not actually astronomical crazy stuff happening out there in space, but it was the staff at the observatory going on break. They correlated the times. But here we're just talking about that one observatory in Australia, right, but not the one found by the undergrad that's right, the one in Australia had a bunch of these, and so people thought, well, you know, maybe none of these things are real. Then they figured out that they would see a very similar kind of pulse when the staff at this observatory in Australia would heat up their food on break and open the door to the microwave before it stopped cooking, and it was this brief moment of interfering. RAN's like you know when you open the door to the microwave. Of course the microwave shuts off, but this is like a little blip, little blip of radiation that comes out. It's not dangerous levels, but it is enough to interfere with the operation of a supersensitive ear. Right, that's what a telescope is, it's a super sensitive ear. And so they correlated this to when those guys were going on break and they verified it, like went over to the marcro wave and tried it, and they could tell that that's what was creating some of those signatures. So it was picking up the actual microwaves coming from the oven or just like the act of shutting down the microwave emittor in their oven when you open the door. That's somehow creates, you know, amidst radiation in this weird frequency, there's a little bit of microwave energy that actually escaped. Yeah, and if you wait for the to ding in the microwave turned off before you opened it, then none of it escaped. But if you just yanked the door open before it was finished, and this little blip would sneak out. Um, and that's what caused some of these fake astronomical signals. So my microwave operates at at the same radio frequency, says radio, it's enough to interfere. Yeah, exactly. Um. The frequency spectrums overlap a little bit. And it was hard to pin down because you know, sometimes the staff would let the microwave ding in other times they were a little more impatient and they would yank it open. So it wasn't like every single day at six pm, it was like that one guy or the one woman just you know Bob or Sally, that just the impatient, impatient one in the staff that just um was making all this funs for everybody. Yeah, exactly. I remember when this paper came out, it was like two thousand fifteen. The paper came out when they identified the source of these things as literally like microwave background. And you know, because we have this other thing in physics called the cosmic microwave background. There were a lot of jokes about Australian microwave background versus cosmic microwave background, like this is literally a background due to microwaves in Australia. They actually polished this. They said, we had a bunch of signals, but it turned out to be bob in with the microwave exactly. No, it's a hilarious paper, um, and you know, it's a nice piece of work. You know, you understand you've got to really dig into your your signals sometime and understand where they come from. And the folks, for example, a ligo, the ones looking for gravitational waves, they do similar sort of stuff. They have to understand like traffic paths, the microwave too early. Yeah, well, everything affects them. They're looking for tiny little shakes, so they have to understand like, oh, at this time of day, big trucks tend to roll by and that shakes it in this certain way and blah blah slams the door nearby two miles away. They're super sensitive, so they have to catalog all the sources of noise before they can identify something as a signal. So in the same way you see a weird signal on your day that you gotta try to rule out, you know, prosaic explanations, and this was one. And so until they did that, people didn't really believe that fast radio bursts might actually be an astronomical thing because this explanation. But once they isolated this explanation, they ought to remove those. They could tell which ones came from microwave ovens and which ones didn't. Then people started to believe, Okay, maybe these other ones you know from other observatories, um, actually are something astronomical. You mean the ones that were found by the undergrad or do people find other ones? The one found by the undergrad people now thinks is believable. And people have been combing through data and they found, um, just under a hundred other examples of mysterious fasts. Yeah, exactly. And now that we've removed you know, Bob's microwave usage is an explanation for some of them, Um, we can start to believe that these really do come from space. All right, So Bob's Bob did something good. Bob delayed the understanding of radio bursts for at least five years, so I'm not sure you can give them any positive points for that. By creating an artifice, it kind of sharpened scientists ears, so now they can sort of tell when something is artificial or not. And so now maybe you have more confidence that the ones you've seen are actually mysterious radio births from space. Yeah, I'm amazed at your ability to spin that into a positive story. Yes, nicely done. Well, Bob, slip me a hundred. Put in a good word for her. Bob or Bob's sister. Whoever did this needs a serious reputation rehabilitation program. No, but since then, we've identified something on the order of a hundred or just less of these examples in data from around the world. All right, well, let's get into what could be making these mysterious radio bursts and whether or not you should wait for the ding in your microwave. But first, let's take a quick break. All right, Daniel, So what can make these mysterious fast radio burbs? We were hearing them from space. We're pretty sure it's not Bob with the microwave accidentally causing this noise. Um, So something must have caused these one hundred weird signals that we've seen something or someone. Right, that's always the question. You know what you do in astronomy, I I guess not being an astronomer. Is you like, you see some new weird signal and then you look through your category, your you look through your catalog of stuff in the universe and ask could this make that noise? Could this make that noise? And there's nothing out there that we know of, And there's a lot of crazy stuff out there making all sorts of strange signals, but none of the things that we are aware of can make this kind of pulse. What do you mean nothing you're aware of? Like doesn't the Sun make radiation and radaways? Or you know what I mean, Like, how do you know that the Sun isn't making these births? Yeah, well they're not coming from the direction of the sun right there. Coming they come from all over the sky. And if you ask, like where do they come from? In general, they don't even come in general from the direction of the Milky Way. Like if there was something from our galaxy, then you expected to come from something sort of in the plane of the Milky Way. You know that band of scot of stars you see like dribbled across the sky. If it's something from our galaxy, some like weird kind of star in our galaxy, you'd expect to see it more in the direction in the Milky Way, but we don't. We see in all sorts of directions, which means it's most likely coming from outside our galaxy. They're definitely not all coming from the Sun. That's be easy to figure out. You know that they're not coming from our galaxies. So it must be something super far away, which means at the origin it must be like a super powerful burst to be able to hear something. To be able to see a signal from so far away means that it has to be incredibly intense that its source. Remember these other galaxies, I mean, our galaxy is huge, rights a hundred thousand light years across, but these other galaxies there are millions of light years away. And you know, if we send a signal to those galaxies, even if we directed it, it would be pretty pretty hard for any ready to hear it, because these signals dropped by one over the distance squared, So you go twice as far the signal is four times as quiet. You go a thousand times as far right, and the signals a million times quieter. So to be able to hear it from so far away exactly means that at the source that has to be crazy intense, and we also just don't know anything crazy intense and very brief sort of sad trombone sounds. What do you mean is a sad trombone? Well, if you look at the frequencies, the frequency sort of shift. It's not like a single frequency. It starts off at a higher frequency and then it drops quickly to a lower frequency. So it sort of sounds like a sad trombone, and you know, like a warm Oh I see. So maybe it's just the universe providing a soundtrack to my to my comedy. Every time you make a bad joke, we hear a fast radio burst. We'd be hearing a lot more of them, That's all I gotta say. Right, every time I say a joke, you know, got up there, it hits the button and the audience gets a little world. Yeah. So, so how powerful are these then? Well, we're not exactly sure. Some of them we've located, like a few of them have repeated, so we've been able to like spot exactly where they're coming from because it came because we've heard them more than once. Um. But estimates are that they have as much energy in just one of these pulses as our sun puts out in eighty years of learning. Right, So it's frying you, it's causing summer, it's you know, toasting mercury. All that energy put out by the Sun over eighty years. Concentrate that into a few milliseconds. That's the amount of energy we're talking about. If what we're hearing is coming from another galaxy, then that's how powerful it must be. When it happens, it must be like some kind of explosion or some big event. It's definitely some kind of big event. And you know, we don't have a whole lot of data because we only have, like you know, less than a hundred examples, and each one is really brief. You don't have a lot of information on each one. It's not like you have a long, extended tail you can study. But we can do really clever tricks. We can like ask, like, you know, what's the arrival time and this frequency versus the other frequency, and we can use that to think about like how it propagates through the universe because different kinds of stuff in the universe allow different frequency signals to propagate at different speeds or block them or whatever. So we have these things. It's called the dispersion measure that tells us like how spread out is the signal. And all these things are totally consistent with a really small source, really really really far away source, meaning that the thing that makes these can't be really big. It's not like an entire galaxy is emitting this thing. It's something that's like a few hundred kilometers across. Wait, how do we know this? Because of the way there's sort of the shape of a pulse. Right. First of all, it's really really short, right, So if you have some huge object that's creating a signal and it's really enormous, then you're gonna hear a longer signal just because if it comes from the back of it, you'll take longer to get to you, right. But if it comes from a tiny little source like a point or something like a meter across, then it's possible to create a really really tight signal. And so because this thing only lasts a millisecond, then you can give us a sense like a rough and order magnitude estimate for the size of the object that's making it. Something really big makes a really big pulse, then you know, just the physics of it wouldn't allow it to create something so sharp. Yeah, exactly, you need something really small to create a really sharp signature. And you know, this is the kind of thing we do in physics. Were like, let's squeeze as much information as we can out of this tiny little bit of data. And so that's what we know. It's something super far away, kind of small and really intense, and there's just nothing in our catalog of knowledge that's capable of producing that. Let's jump right into what could it be? Aliens? You know, aliens are on the top of my list for I think you always put any at the top of your list, Daniel. So, no, astrophysics are very creative bunch. And so what they do when they're sitting in front of this kind of mystery is they try to get creative and they say, well, but if we take something which is capable of creating radio waves and it's really intensely powerful, like a magnetar. Remember what a magnetar is. It's a super category of neutron star, right, A neutron star. That's different than a minotaur, right, that's right, it's it's at the center of the maze. No, it's a pulsar that's super duper powerful and has a crazy magnetic field. And they're looking at thinks that have a lot of magnetic fields because this is e M radiation. So they're thinking maybe it's some like weird twist in a magnetic field that the magnetic field buckles and shocks or whatever, and that creates these pulses. And so one category of ideas is like, maybe it's like a an earthquake on the surface of a magnetar that creates like a little burst of energy, a little shock wave of energy. Yeah. And even that's not a quake on the surface of a star, yeah, starquakes, right, that sounds like an awesome science fiction novel starquake, Yeah. Yeah. And so they call these things hyper flares when a magnetard just like bursts out a big explosion of energy. But even those hyper cracks somehow, yeah, you know, like a yeah, like it cracks or like it it um. Yeah, We'll think about what happens in an earthquake exactly. These the plates rub up against each other and you get a release of energy. So it's not an exact analogy to what's happening on the surface of this magnetard and another galaxy, but it's it's similar. And even that, the calculation suggest is not enough to power these things. So now they're thinking about, like what happens and then maybe another one follows it, and the two interfere in this way that gives this first one a boost. I mean they're having a really, really reached to the bottom of the barrel here to come up with explanations for what might explain these things. And there are other models as models, like maybe it's some strange thing it happens when a black hole eats a neutron star, although by now we've seen a few of those with our gravitational wave detectors, and they don't always come with fast radio bursts, so I think that explanation is is not as popular. But the signals from the gravitational waves are sort of similar, aren't they. And aren't they also like a sad trombone and also really short? Yeah, but they have a sort of a ringdown effect. They're like a wan wan wan wan wan wan wan um, And I think they're longer than just a few milliseconds. But actually I don't remember the details. Another explanation, which I love only because the name is awesome, is that people think it might be this kind of star called a blitz Are. Blitz Are, Yeah, blitz Are is named after Yeah, of course, you know you're in the situation room and you gotta come up with an explanation, and so you reach with the blitzer and and your beard just radiates energy. And they called it the blitzer. That's right, And that's going to be the plot for the next movie with Vin Diesel and Wolf Blitzer. Right there, you go fasten the blitze part. Blitz Are is a special kind of pulse are that sometimes collapses and turns into a black hole. And I don't know why they called it a blitz are, but they think that maybe when that happens, perhaps it releases this kind of energy. But you know, people are really stretching when it's becoming a black hole. It cries out one less blitz yeah, exactly. It's like it's maybe that's where it comes from. It's the death rattle of a pulsar. Perhaps, all right, but that's just one possibility. Another possibility, and what else could it be. Well, there are other crazy ideas, like maybe it's some strange quantum mechanical effect. You know, there are really weird quantum mechanical things that happen in every star, Like you know, how does light get from the inside of a star out into the universe? Right? That requires quantum mechanical things like tunneling, which we talked about in another podcast episode. And so some people have come up with a strange quantum mechanical entanglement effect called super radiance when a big blob of the star sort of gets entangled and and this could happen like if you're really close to the center of a galaxy, and when a big blob of stuff becomes sort of quantum mechanical on a macroscopic scale, that they can do things that the individual blob not can't necessarily. And one of the ideas is this super radiance that they can admit a huge pulsive energy all at once. But this is really one of the more fringe theories. Wait, the idea is that the whole sun, the whole star sort of becomes quantum synchronized or something. And the idea and not the whole star that that would be cool, but sort of a large blob of it um, you know, and the large blob is a hundred kilometers or something, so that would be pretty awesome. We do sort of similar experiments on Earth. It's related Bose Einstein condensates our materials, where a bud just stuff has the same quantum state, and so that has a macroscopy of properties. But that those are usually super tiny, aren't they aren't they um like the size of a of a few atoms or something. Yeah, we've never succeeded in building one that's you know, that's really macroscopic. That's like, you know, meters wide for sure. No, we never never achieved that. But there is a relationship between that kind of thing and these sort of super radiance effects. But it's all this is all just speculation. And the thing I love about this is we have the data. Right, This is not just people sitting around thinking, maybe this happens inside of stars, maybe this thing, let's give this thing this funny name. Here, we're trying to explain something real, right. The universe is telling us there's this new weird thing out there you do not know about. And it's a clue, right, it's a clue that we have to unravel, and in decades to come, somebody will understand what causes these things. And it could be something new and amazing and crazy, or it could just be like, oh, some new phase of the life of a neutron star. And you're pretty sure it's not Bob with the microwave down in the kitchen. Look, Bob has been fired, okay, so he's not creating a more problem with me. He went to work somewhere else, or she went to work somewhere else. No, they're much more careful now with the microt waves at radio astronomy facilities. But though that is one of the funnest papers I've ever read. Now they've ruled out, But it could be it could be an alien, an alien Bob somewhere else in the universe opening it's giant, super radiant Blitzer star early too early before the day, causing these things. You know, I've never heard that explanation. I think you might have solved this right here live on the podcast. Or you're going Nobel prize plate please, Yeah, the Nobel prize for that one is just a bag of popcorn. Actually, what it was my undergrad who came up with that explanation, but I am taking all the credit. At least share the popcorn with him, will you? All right? So that's uh, yet another incredible mr you out there in the universe that we are pretty sure is there, but we can't explain what is causing you. That's right, The universe is telling us here's a clue, there's something weird. You don't understand, figure it out, and it's We're only a decade in and we still basically have no idea what this thing is. So the next time you reheat something in your microwave, for the love of science, please wait for it to ding all of science. Thanks you for your patients. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows h