An international team has spotted a remote blast of cosmic radio waves lasting less than a millisecond. This ‘fast radio burst’ (FRB) is the most distant ever detected. Its source was pinned down by the European Southern Observatory\u2019s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in a galaxy so far away that its light took eight billion years to reach us. The FRB is also one of the most energetic ever observed; in a tiny fraction of a second it released the equivalent of our Sun\u2019s total emission over 30 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The discovery of the burst, named FRB 20220610A, was made in June last year by the ASKAP radio telescope in Australia and it smashed the team\u2019s previous distance record by 50 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cUsing ASKAP\u2019s array of dishes, we were able to determine precisely where the burst came from,\u201d says Stuart Ryder, an astronomer from Macquarie University in Australia and the co-lead author of the study published today in Science. \u201cThen we used [ESO\u2019s VLT] in Chile to search for the source galaxy, finding it to be older and further away than any other FRB source found to date and likely within a small group of merging galaxies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The discovery confirms that FRBs can be used to measure the ‘missing’ matter between galaxies, providing a new way to ‘weigh’ the Universe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Current methods of estimating the mass of the Universe are giving conflicting answers and challenging the standard model of cosmology. \u201cIf we count up the amount of normal matter in the Universe \u2014 the atoms that we are all made of \u2014 we find that more than half of what should be there today is missing,\u201d says Ryan Shannon, a professor at the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, who also co-led the study. \u201cWe think that the missing matter is hiding in the space between galaxies, but it may just be so hot and diffuse that it’s impossible to see using normal techniques.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFast radio bursts sense this ionised material. Even in space that is nearly perfectly empty they can ‘see’ all the electrons, and that allows us to measure how much stuff is between the galaxies,\u201d Shannon says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Finding distant FRBs is key to accurately measuring the Universe\u2019s missing matter, as shown by the late Australian astronomer Jean-Pierre (‘J-P’) Macquart in 2020. \u201cJ-P showed that the further away a fast radio burst is, the more diffuse gas it reveals between the galaxies. This is now known as the Macquart relation. Some recent fast radio bursts appeared to break this relationship. Our measurements confirm the Macquart relation holds out to beyond half the known Universe,\u201d says Ryder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhile we still don\u2019t know what causes these massive bursts of energy, the paper confirms that fast radio bursts are common events in the cosmos and that we will be able to use them to detect matter between galaxies, and better understand the structure of the Universe,\u201d says Shannon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The result represents the limit of what is achievable with telescopes today, although astronomers will soon have the tools to detect even older and more distant bursts, pin down their source galaxies and measure the Universe\u2019s missing matter. The international Square Kilometre Array Observatory is currently building two radio telescopes in South Africa and Australia that will be capable of finding thousands of FRBs, including very distant ones that cannot be detected with current facilities. ESO\u2019s Extremely Large Telescope, a 39-metre telescope under construction in the Chilean Atacama Desert, will be one of the few telescopes able to study the source galaxies of bursts even further away than FRB 20220610A.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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