> Scientists believe FRBs emanate from powerful astrophysical phenomena billions of light years away, but they have yet to determine their origin.
Are there any leading theories?
Are there any leading theories?
There are good reasons for these specific models to be favored. But honestly, we don't know for sure yet. Could it be cosmic strings? Evaporating microscopic black holes? Blobs of gas being flash-annihilated by drifting into the beams of active galactic nuclei? Theorists have models that seem to be OK on paper, and we're working hard to kill their models with new observations.
(One thing I'll say - and I say this as a firm optimist about the prospect for aliens - this is NOT aliens.)
On that wiki you can sort them alphabetically, which one professional in the field has termed "the most sensible way of [ranking them]", but other than that there's no clear consensus.
It's not really surprising: until the Chime results there's only been a single FRB that has recurred, so mostly the theorists have had a small collection of strange noises with no context that they should try to explain. Given the breezy restrictions imposed by "no context", they've taken some liberties.
What is that crazy need we have to put in work, for no great gain, to keep utterly random people around the world updated in real time of whatever is going on?
These days, I seem to stop myself reading the news article , just head over to the right forum, and look for such comments. It's like the news industry has become more or less irrelevant, other than in surfacing a list of headlines, which then seed my "find best comment" search algorithm.
We don't get a lot of opportunities to talk about this - you can't annoy your friends with work talk all the time, so going for "utterly random people" is your only chance unless you're in science communication.
Don't trust, and verify.