» Home > In the News

Radio Bursts

11 June 2022
Astronomy

At https://phys.org/news/2022-06-strange-radio.html … concerns the source of very active repeating fast radio bursts, and a persistent radion emission between those bursts. The scientists find this odd behaviour. What is it all about? They are described as mysterious objects, which  doesn’t help the layman as the universe is full of mysterious things going on. It emits frequent, repeating bursts of radion waves. A lot of speculation follows.

At https://phys.org/news/2022-06-cosmic-dawn-epoch-reionization.html … researchers pinpoint the end of the ‘cosmic dawn’ and the ‘epoch of ionization’. One is immediately struck by the acceptance of such ideas by the authors as if any facts were involved. They are both hypothesis. Noting else. Yet, the researchers are obviously committed to the hypothesis, possibly even part of the team that dreamt up the idea in the first instance. Others may not be so like minded. However, they begin with an acceptance of Big Bang, which is really another hypothesis that dominates current thinking, so one can understand that. You have to begin somewhere. However, we may note that actually explaining the existence of geomagnetic properties and goings on in the universe, has a need for an explanation, and presumably, this is why the reionisation event was created. When did all this happen? As usual, all the catastrophic events, and mysteries, are pushed to the early universe. We are now told the re-ionisation process came to an end leaving the universe with hot gas, or ionised plasma. This occurred one billion years after Big Bang, or roughly so. After that everything was much as it is. I wonder what Fred Hoyle would have said.

Suffice to say, by pinpointing the end of the period of ionisation scientists hope to now be able to show the source of that ionisation. Be prepared for a big follow-up as this is not possible at the moment. To arrive at their conclusions some clever footwork was involved. They used hydrogen gas at the 21cm spectral line, quasars, which are bright discs of hot gas, or plasma, surrounding black holes in distant galaxies, and a liberal amount of computer modeling. A fascinating field of research, and very clever stuff.

 

 

 

 

Skip to content