A second study was published on the same day. science, shed more light on the mysterious burst and its diversity. This group of researchers, primarily affiliated with Australian institutions, has discovered the farthest and brightest fast radio burst ever observed. In less than a millisecond, it radiated as much energy as the Sun does in more than 16 years, and did so at a distance of about 10 billion light years. This is about 4 billion light-years farther away than the previous record holder, and five times as energetic. This suggests that the bursts don’t just originate from nearby space.
Using Australia’s Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder, an international team led by Swinburne University of Technology astronomer Ryan Shannon was able to glimpse this fast radio burst, which occurred when the universe was less than half its current age. Ta. “It’s not completely unimpeded, but it’s pretty amazing that he can receive millisecond signals that take eight billion years to reach Earth,” Shannon says.
That signal, known as FRB 20220610A, is the brightest or most energetic high-speed radio burst ever detected. Shannon likens the energy to a microwave oven because of its similar frequency range. The energy from that single explosion is enough to microwave a bowl of popcorn twice the size of the sun, he says.
Space isn’t exactly a vacuum, so fast radio bursts don’t travel straight through space. The signal passes through the gas. Gases can be turbulent or bulky, dense or diffuse. Distorts the signal slightly, broadening it or adding noise. Radio waves can also be deflected by the gravity of large celestial bodies. This process is called gravitational lensing. These distortions embed information in the burst’s signal about the material it passed through on its way to Earth.
Such distortions gave Shannon and his colleagues a clue that FRB 20220610A likely came from afar. They noticed that the radio signals were slightly out of sync thanks to a frequency-dependent time delay caused by the gas that the bursts pass between the host galaxy and our galaxy.
These distortions mean that ultrafast flashes can also be used as astrophysical probes to study clouds of gas and dust as radio bursts pass between their sources and Earth, says researchers at the University of Amsterdam. said Snelder’s colleague Jason Hessels. These gases are too faint to see, but by how we bend the radio signal, we can tell where they are or how abundant or clumpy they are. “These bursts are so short that just a tiny bit of gas between the star and the galaxy distorts the radio signal. It can spread out, scatter, or be affected by gravitational lensing,” Hessels said. he says. He calls fast radio bursts “a unique tool for studying invisible matter.”
“The shorter it is, the more accurate you can be,” he says.
Taken together, the wide range of fast radio bursts cataloged in the two studies suggests that there may be many types of sources, not all of which are explosions from pulsating magnetars. It may not be. Some may come from bright pulsars, whose beams are driven by rotation rather than magnetic fields. Others may originate from black holes that eat stars, emitting jets of gas that generate shock waves that generate radio flashes. This diversity could explain why some bursts last a million times longer or are thousands of times brighter than others. It may also explain why it is so difficult to identify a single type of source. One.
“The types of bursts we’re finding and the locations we’re finding them coming from are becoming increasingly diverse,” Hessels said. “That suggests there are multiple explanations. That should make theorists happy, because there are dozens of theories.”
