There is no shortage of mystery in our universe, many of which we don’t even know exist yet. For astronomers, one of the biggest ones is concerning fast radio bursts, or FRBs.

FRBs are immensely powerful bursts of energy that come from deep in outer space. They have been able to detect them for over a decade, but they do not yet know what is causing them. Over the years there have been many theories, but nothing is certain.

While that is still true today, a new paper that has been accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal hopes to get us one step closer to an answer.

One of the main questions is what could possibly cause a burst of so much energy so quickly. These FRBs, after all, put out as much energy in one millisecond as our son emits over the course of three full days.

Prior to this paper, it was thought that these bursts occurred when neutron stars collided with other neutron stars or black holes. While this would certainly have the potential to cause such a large burst of energy, it was not known whether this could happen frequently enough to account for the number of FRBs recorded.

Dang Pham led a team of researchers at the University of Toronto and came up with a new theory that is being taken very seriously.

They propose that there is no need for two such massive bodies to collide to cause a FRB. Instead, a smaller object moving at high rates of speed smashing into a neutron star could trigger the event. Something like a large asteroid.

This is not a new theory, but before this paper, it wasn’t known if there were enough asteroids to account for the evidence.

Pham talked about this with Space.com, saying:

“It’s been known for many years that asteroids and comets impacting neutron stars can cause FRB-like signals, but until now, it was unclear if this happened often enough across the universe to explain the rate at which we observe FRBs occurring. We have shown that interstellar objects (ISOs), an understudied class of asteroids and comets thought to be present between stars in galaxies throughout the universe, could be numerous enough that their impacts with neutron stars could explain FRBs!”

In the paper, Pham and his team have calculated that based on the estimated number of neutron stars and the estimated number of sufficiently large asteroids, one such collision could occur about every 10 million years per neutron star.

While that sounds extremely rare, it actually matches up very closely with the rate of FRBs that astronomers have observed.

Pham also discussed these findings with New Scientists, where he explained what would happen when an asteroid collided with a neutron star and turned into plasma:

“This ball of plasma is fired along the magnetic field and creates a beam of radiation that might produce an FRB.”

In the paper, they suggest that if they are correct, the number of FRBs should be increasing as the universe gets older due to the increase in neutron stars and asteroids in existence.

Of course, additional research is needed in this area, but this understanding of how frequently asteroids could be crashing into neutron stars is a significant step. It may also be useful in other areas of astronomy.

One thing is for sure… the amount of energy in FRBs is wild!.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about why we should be worried about the leak in the bottom of the ocean.