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Astronomers have traced one of the most powerful and distant radio bursts ever detected back to its unusual cosmic home: a group of rare “blob-like” galaxies. The unexpected discovery could shed more light on what causes the mysterious radio wave bursts, which have puzzled scientists for years.
The intense signal, named FRB 20220610A, was first detected on June 10, 2022, and traveled 8 billion light years to reach Earth. The distance light travels in one year is a light year, or 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion kilometers).
Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are intense bursts of millisecond radio waves of unknown origin. The first FRB was discovered in 2007, and since then, hundreds of these fast, cosmic flashes have been detected coming from distant points across the globe.
This particular fast radio burst lasted less than a millisecond, but was four times more energetic than previously detected FRBs. The burst released the equivalent of our sun’s energetic emissions over a 30-year period, according to an initial study published in October.
Many FRBs emit very bright radio waves that last only a few milliseconds at most before disappearing, making them difficult to see.
Radio telescopes have helped track the paths of fast cosmic rays, so the researchers used the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder, or ASKAP, a radio telescope in Western Australia and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile to to find out where the enigmatic burst came from. .
The observations led scientists to a massive celestial blob, which was initially thought to be either a single irregular galaxy or a group of three interacting galaxies.
Now, astronomers have used images from the Hubble Space Telescope to reveal that the fast radio burst came from a group of at least seven galaxies that are so close together that they could all fit within the Milky Way galaxy.
The results were presented Tuesday at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans.
An unusual galactic group
The galaxies in the group appear to be interacting and may even be in the process of merging, which could have triggered the rapid radio burst, according to the researchers.
“Without the Hubble imaging, it would still be a mystery whether this FRB came from one monolithic galaxy or some kind of interacting system,” said lead study author Alexa Gordon, a doctoral student in astronomy at Weinberg College of the Arts at Northwestern University. and Sciences, in a statement.
“It’s these kinds of environments—these strange ones—that drive us toward a better understanding of the mystery of FRBs.”
The galaxy group, known as a compact group, is exceptional and an example of the “closest galaxy-scale structures we know of,” said study co-author Wen-fai Fong, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern and a consultant Gordon.
As the galaxies interact, they could trigger a burst of star formation, which could be linked to the burst, Gordon said.
Fast radio bursts have mostly been traced back to isolated galaxies, but astronomers have also found them in globular clusters, and now, as a dense group, Gordon said.
“We need to keep finding more of these FRBs, near and far, and in all these different kinds of environments,” she said.
Investigating the origins of fast radio bursts
Almost 1,000 fast radio bursts have been detected since they were first discovered about two decades ago, but astronomers still don’t know what causes the bursts.
But many agree that dense objects, such as black holes or neutron stars, are likely to involve the dense remnants of exploded stars. Magnetars, or highly magnetized stars, may be the root cause of fast radio bursts, according to recent research.
Understanding where fast radio bursts come from could help astronomers determine more about the underlying cause that causes them to stream across the universe.
“Despite the hundreds of FRB events found so far, only a fraction of those have been reported to their host galaxies,” study co-author Yuxin Vic Dong said in a statement. “Within that small fraction, only a few came from a dense Galactic environment, but none were seen in such a dense group. Therefore, his place of birth is very rare.” Dong is a graduate research fellow and doctoral student in astronomy in Fong’s lab at Northwestern.
Revelations about the nature of the universe could lead to further insights into fast radio bursts. As the explosions travel through space for billions of years, they interact with cosmic matter.
“Radio waves, in particular, are sensitive to any interfering material in appearance – from the FRB site to us,” Fong said. “That means the waves have to travel through any cloud of material around the FRB’s location, through its host galaxy, across the universe and finally through the Milky Way. Since the FRB signal itself is time-delayed, we can measure the sum of all these contributions.”
Astronomers are hoping for increasingly sensitive methods to detect fast radio bursts in the future that could find more of them at greater distances, Gordon said.
“We’re finally trying to answer the questions: What causes them? What are they and what are their origins? Hubble’s observations provide a fascinating glimpse into the kinds of surprising environments that cause these mysterious events,” said Fong.
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