TechInScience

UC Berkeley astronomers have detected 15 fast, high-energy radio bursts from a mysterious source across the universe. The bursts were detected by Breakthrough Listen, an initiative headquartered at UC Berkeley that aims to find evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence and civilization. The 15 bright, brief millisecond-long radio impulses detected by Breakthrough Listen originated from a source called FRB 121102. FRB 121102 is located in the constellation of Auriga, in a dwarf galaxy 2.5 billion light-years away, according to Andrew Siemion, director of Berkeley SETI Research Center and the Breakthrough Listen Initiative. These 15 new radio bursts are the first of their kind to exhibit multiple, repeating signals at such high frequencies, making them a rarely observed phenomenon, according to Vishal Gajjar, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Berkeley SETI Research Center who discovered the bursts. “ Most of the observations of this source was done at 1,400 megahertz. We did ...

Should a person venture into a specific type of black hole, it may be able to provide them with infinite possible futures, according to a study published Jan. 17. The study focused on the “ fate of Cauchy horizons”  — whether or not someone who approaches these horizons would survive based on the exchange of energy within and beyond the black hole. Peter Hintz, a UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow in mathematics who contributed to the study, used a theoretical, highly charged black hole. “Normally, when physics works as it is supposed to, if you know your position and velocity, and those of anything that might influence you, you can compute, at least in principle, what will happen,” said study contributor Aron Jansen in an email. “This is what breaks down at a Cauchy horizon; we simply don’t know what will happen (and) in that sense it can be anything.” It is possible to travel beyond the event horizon of a highly charged black hole and enter the Cauchy horizon, acc...