MessageToEagle.com – Australian researchers using a CSIRO radio telescope in Western Australia almost doubled the known number of ‘fast radio bursts’ – mysterious radio waves from deep space.
The team’s discoveries include the closest and brightest fast radio bursts ever detected.
“We’ve found 20 fast radio bursts in a year, almost doubling the number detected worldwide since they were discovered in 2007,” lead author Dr Ryan Shannon, from Swinburne University of Technology, said in a press release.
Fast radio bursts come from all over the sky and last for just milliseconds but astronomers don’t know what causes them but it must involve incredible energy—equivalent to the amount released by the Sun in 80 years.
However, they have proved that fast radio bursts are coming from the other side of the Universe rather than from our own galactic neighborhood.
“The bursts travel for billions of years and occasionally pass through clouds of gas,” informed study co-author Dr Jean-Pierre Macquart, from the Curtin University.
“Each time this happens, the different wavelengths that make up a burst are slowed by different amounts. Eventually, the burst reaches Earth with its spread of wavelengths arriving at the telescope at slightly different times, like swimmers at a finish line.
“Timing the arrival of the different wavelengths tells us how much material the burst has traveled through on its journey, “Macquart said.
“And because we’ve shown that fast radio bursts come from far away, we can use them to detect all the missing matter located in the space between galaxies—which is a really exciting discovery.”
The next task for the researchers is to pinpoint the locations of bursts on the sky.
“We’ll be able to localise the bursts to better than a thousandth of a degree,” Dr Shannon said.
“That’s about the width of a human hair seen ten metres away, and good enough to tie each burst to a particular galaxy.”
Their findings are reported in the journal Nature.
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