Weird radio bursts are from 3 billion light-years away

It is believed that understanding the mysterious voids between galaxies as well as mapping the distribution of matter across the universe will be easy after closely studying these high-energy astrophysical pulses. Now 18 known FRBs exist but it has been very hard to determine the source of their origin. The results finally affirm what many astronomers had suspected all along: these bursts are so bright they might push the boundaries of known physics. Finding the location can help a scientist in discovering what generates the bursts. Spectroscopic data from Gemini also enabled the researchers to determine that the dwarf galaxy is more than 3 billion light-years from Earth. We knew the coordinates in space from VLA, but discovering what sits at those coordinates other than the source of the intense radio bursts required another telescope, the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii. In an interview with the journal Nature, she said, “This detection has really broken open the gates of a new realm of science and discovery”. Probably not, Chatterjee tells The Two-Way.

Will we ever fully understand the mysteries of outer space? Yet now we know better.

Astronomers speculated that the culprit might instead be some sort of powerful outburst from a rotating neutron star or perhaps a pulsar.

That repeated burst was studied for six months, letting scientists find its exact position in the sky. “Maybe it’s a neutron star orbiting a black hole”.

“I don’t exaggerate when I say there are more theories for what these could be than there are observed bursts”, said lead author Shami Chatterjee, a researcher at Cornell University, according to BBC News. The team hopes there will be other examples detected. It’s still the only known repeating FRB, after all; maybe there are multiple types of FRB, or this particular one is just an outlier.

“It was a pretty intensive observational and computational challenge”, Chatterjee says.

Astronomers discovered 234 mysterious signals from stars in October, any one of which could be different alien species trying to talk to us. In that time, they added up 83 hours of observations.

But in 2012, the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico also picked up an FRB, confirming the signal’s cosmic origin.

This time, they got lucky.

The source of signals first detected in 2007 have been pinpointed to a galaxy far, far, away.

Shriharsh Tendulkar, the co-author of the study, said in a statement that the dwarf galaxy has far fewer stars than our Milky Way. “It’s something that happened three billion years in the past, when the universe was slightly different than it is today”.

So what was that event? These may be among the most explanations behind the FRBs but as Bryan Butler of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory pointed out, that these may not apply at all to this signal. It could be originating from an active galactic nucleus, which emits FRBs as blobs of plasma drift into its jets and are vaporized. Neutron stars are dense objects that form when a star explodes and the remaining material collapses on itself.

“But if this were true, most astronomers would have expected a bright galaxy to be present, because large black holes are typically found only in large galaxies”.

As for other FRBs, if they’re similar to this one, we’ll need precise measurements with powerful arrays like the Very Large Array to nail down their location. “But if not, hey, great, nature’s given us two fantastic mysteries instead of one fantastic mystery”.