The signal was thought to be a telescope artifact, a trick of light masquerading as a cosmic curiosity. The first FRB was discovered in 2007, buried deep in archival data of a telescope in Australia, while astronomers were looking for another astrophysical phenomenon. The discovery is an intriguing addition to a growing inventory of knowledge in a field whose earliest evidence was almost dismissed as a fluke. Read: What’s better than one mysterious cosmic signal? When Li and I spoke this week, she told me she’s still checking-and the rhythm is still there. Like so many people this year, Li has spent most of her days at home, rarely venturing beyond the walls of her small apartment in Bonn, Germany, but the Canadian observatory continues to scan the skies, catching the fleeting FRBs as little smudges of black against a plot of white noise. The paper on this discovery, published earlier this month, marked the end of formal observations in February. Astronomers traced the source to a spiral galaxy about 500 million light-years away, where it’s still going strong. The FRB, known by the bar-code-esque designation 180916.J0158+65, is the first to show this kind of regular cadence. (This is, perhaps, the purest definition of radio silence.) Li was monitoring FRBs, tracking their arrival times at a radio telescope in British Columbia, when she noticed that unusual pattern from one FRB source-four days on, 12 days off. In the past decade, astronomers managed to detect about 100 of them before they vanished. They show up without warning and flash for a few milliseconds, matching the radiance of entire galaxies.Īstronomers don’t know what makes them, only that they can travel for millions, even billions, of years from their sources before reaching us. She works on a Canadian-led project, CHIME, that studies astrophysical phenomena called “fast radio bursts.” These invisible flashes, known as FRBs for short, reach Earth from all directions in space. The pattern-the well-defined swings from frenzy to stillness and back again-persisted like clockwork for more than a year.ĭongzi Li, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, started tracking these signals in 2019. Then, another four days of haphazard pulses. Generally considered a classic folk rock song, the song was added to the National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically important" in 2012 along with the rest of the Sounds of Silence album.For about four days, the radio waves would arrive at random. The song was a top-ten hit in multiple countries worldwide, among them Australia, Austria, West Germany, Japan and the Netherlands. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending January 1, 1966, leading the duo to reunite and hastily record their second album, which Columbia titled Sounds of Silence in an attempt to capitalize on the song's success. The single was released in September 1965. Simon & Garfunkel were not informed of the song's remix until after its release. The growing airplay led Tom Wilson, the song's producer, to remix the track, overdubbing electric instruments and drums. In 1965, the song began to attract airplay at radio stations in Boston, Massachusetts, and throughout Florida. Released on October 19, 1964, the album was a commercial failure and led to the group disbanding, with Simon returning to England and Art Garfunkel to his studies at Columbia University. A studio audition led to the duo signing a record deal with Columbia Records, and the song was recorded in March 1964 at Columbia Studios in New York City for inclusion on their debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.
The song was written by Paul Simon over several months in 19. "The Sound of Silence", originally "The Sounds of Silence", is a song by the American music duo Simon & Garfunkel.