Of all the fireworks that shoot through space, fast radio bursts (FRBs) are among the most powerful and mysterious. While our radio telescope is recovering, Hundreds of known FRBs, radio astronomers recently detected one of the most fascinating bursts ever. Not only is it farther away than any FRB observed to date, it is also the most energetic.
Such superlative FRBs overturn the already vague understanding of the origin of the burst. A FRB is a sudden surge of radio waves that typically lasts less than a second, if not milliseconds. And they are very high energy. they can deliver The same amount of energy (in milliseconds) as the sun emits in three days. Nevertheless, it is not known exactly how they are formed.
The new event, which astronomers affectionately call FRB 20220610A, first appeared as a blip on the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder, which has an antenna in the desert about 360 miles north of Perth.When astronomers measured the burst redshiftThey calculated that it left its source about 8 billion years ago, as explained in the paper. published Today is science.
After pinpointing the source of the burst in the sky and tracking it with visible light and infrared telescopes, the authors were able to develop a blurry image of the galaxy merging.
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“Of course, the further out into space you go, the fainter the galaxies become because they are further away. Identifying the host galaxy is very difficult, but that’s what they did.” sarah bourke sporaaan astronomer who studies FRBs at West Virginia University, was not an author of the study.
The Fed doesn’t get excited just because it’s loud. For an explosion from outside the Milky Way to reach us, it must traverse millions or even billions of light-years through the near-sky space between galaxies. In the process, you will encounter very sparse ionized particles. This is what prevents large parts of the universe from becoming completely empty, and astronomers call it the intergalactic medium. Maybe we’ll make up That’s half the “normal” matter in the universe.
“We don’t know much about it because it’s so rare that it’s hard to detect,” he says. Daniele Michilian astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but he was also not a study author.
As the FRB traverses the intergalactic medium on its long voyage, the particles scatter radio waves, leaving fingerprints that astronomers can distinguish. In this way, scientists can use his FRB to investigate the intergalactic medium. More distant bursts, like FRB 20220610A, could allow astronomers to study media that span large swaths of the universe.
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“This is very exciting. It’s definitely one of the great applications for high-speed wireless bursts,” he says. Ziggy Plenis, an astronomer who studies FRBs at the University of Toronto, was also not part of the author’s group. “Fast radio bursts are currently the only ones known to interact with the intergalactic medium in meaningful ways that we can measure their properties.”
In the future, astronomers may be able to use FRBs to study how the universe expands. But to solve the mystery, astronomers will need to detect his FRB from even deeper in the universe’s past than his FRB 20220610A. “For many applications, that’s still not far enough away,” Preunis says. “But it certainly bodes well.”
A balancing act is required. Over long enough distances, particles in the intergalactic medium strip away the FRBs until they are dispersed into background noise. To survive, the Fed must become brighter and more energetic. Conversely, astronomers can estimate the original energy of a burst by assessing how diffused it is.
When we crunched the numbers for FRB 20220610A, we found that it was the most energetic burst Earth has ever seen. (Another recently observed burst, FRB 20201124A, within the same order of magnitude, but FRB 20220610A is the record holder. ) A burst with so much energy does some damage to astronomers’ understanding of what generates her FRBs in the first place.
Again, we don’t have a final answer to that question. Complicating the question, some FRBs are one-time flashes, while others are repeated, suggesting that the two types of FRBs may have two different origins. (So FRB 20220610A appears to have been a one-off. However, another high-energy FRB, FRB 20201124A, appears to be recurring.)
Nevertheless, astronomers have simulated several scenarios, primarily involving neutron stars. Perhaps the FRB explodes from near the surface of the neutron star, or perhaps the FRB is ejected by shock waves passing through the material spewed out by the neutron star.
But when the authors crunched the numbers with their new FRB, they found that neither of these two scenarios could easily trigger a burst with so much energy. This suggests that more work is needed before theoretical astronomers can satisfactorily explain these phenomena.
“What I always think about fast radio bursts is that every time we see a new radio burst, it breaks the mold of the previous radio burst,” Sporer said.
