by Ryan Foltz | Feb 7, 2014 | Daily Paper Summaries
Small and massive compact galaxies are some of the hardest galaxies to find, but they could potentially reveal how galaxies evolved in the early universe.
by Anson Lam | Jan 27, 2014 | Daily Paper Summaries
By examining their expansion rate over time, Type II supernovae provide a way to measure extragalactic distances.
by Nick Ballering | Dec 31, 2013 | Daily Paper Summaries
A new debris disk is discovered by the Herschel Space Telescope around the red dwarf tertiary star in the famous Fomalhaut system.
by Korey Haynes | Dec 25, 2013 | Daily Paper Summaries
The Crab Nebula ups its game when it’s found to host the first molecule containing a noble gas to be found in space.
by Anson Lam | Dec 23, 2013 | Daily Paper Summaries
From measurements of quasar spectra, we can determine whether or not the fine structure constant is really a constant.
by Yvette Cendes | Dec 16, 2013 | Daily Paper Summaries
Title: Fast Radio Bursts May Originate from Nearby Flaring Stars Authors: Abraham Loeb, Yossi Shvartzvald, Dan Maoz First Author’s Institution: Institute for Theory and Computation, Harvard University Paper Status: MNRAS, in press One of the most intriguing discoveries in radio astronomy in recent years has been the discovery of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). Originally called Lorimer bursts after the first (and for some time, only) burst observed, there are currently six of these bursts published in the literature, and astronomers are puzzled because they look very different from any other astronomical signals observed before. They are bright- FRBs are the brightest astronomical phenomena seen in radio frequencies, and they don’t seem to have known counterparts in other wavelengths. They are brief- a burst only lasts a few microseconds, and they don’t seem to repeat. And they have a very high dispersion measure (DM)- a relationship between time and frequency that tells you how far away a signal comes from (explained well in this Astrobite)- which has indicated an extragalactic origin for FRBs. To writ, what exactly FRBs are and where they come from is a mystery.In this paper, the authors decided to take a different track from previous theories about FRB origins that point to extragalactic sources, and instead tackled the option of a much more local origin. Their proposed candidate sources are flare stars– variable stars which can undergo dramatic and unpredictable increases in brightness. Flare stars are typically dim dwarf stars, and some are already known to produce radio bursts with brief rise times on the order of milliseconds, thought to be produced by cyclotron maser mechanisms in the stellar atmospheres. ...
