“In the past FRBs have been found by sifting through data months or even years later”, said Evan Keane, one of the researchers, in a news release.
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A new system was needed.
And while in the past FRBs have been incredibly hard to detect, they’re predicted to be happening all over the Universe all of the time, we just need the right equipment to see them… something like the Square Kilometre Array, which should allow us to make FRB spotting a regular occurrence. Astronomers started to find handfuls of FRBs buried deep within archival data, but arguments ensued over whether or not these bursts were actually extragalactic. Fortunately, the afterglow from this FRB was seen for six days, providing researchers with the opportunity to precisely mark the source of the burst.
This afterglow gave them time to pinpoint its source with 1,000 times more accuracy than before. Then yet another telescope – the Subaru telescope in Hawaii – was used to image the source galaxy itself.
“If you had asked me in advance, I’d have said we should find FRBs in galaxies where there are lots of things happening”, Dr Johnston says.
An worldwide team of astronomers reported today that they had tracked down the location of a so-called fast radio burst (FRB), a mysterious and rarely detected burst of energy from space that appears as a short flash of radio waves to telescopes on Earth. Now, with the host galaxy’s corresponding distance, astronomers can compute the density of electrons in the intergalactic medium and better map the distribution of matter throughout the universe.
Michael Kramer, from the Max Plank Institute for Radio Astronomer, said the FRB was caused by “a cataclysmic event”. The ATCA observations allow us to pinpoint which galaxy the FRB came from. Doesn’t seem like ground-breaking science, does it?
“The field is about to transition from being kind of a fringe, astrophysical-curiosity freak show to potentially a mainstream research area”, says astronomer Duncan Lorimer of West Virginia University in Morgantown, who led the team that found the first FRB back in 2007, and wrote a News & Views to accompany the latest report.
Simon Johnston, the co-author of the study, explains why the new measurements are so important. “We thought the matter had to be there but it’s nice to have actually made a measurement.” says Keane.
Problem is, astronomers have only ever been able to account for about half the ordinary matter. Dark energy and dark matter continue to be mysteries. Yet this enormity of material, or “ordinary matter”, comprises little more than five per cent of what’s out there. The finding suggests that missing matter in the Universe therefore must be floating in intergalactic space in huge tenuous gas clouds.
The radio burst was first picked up by the Parkes radio telescope, triggering an worldwide alert for follow-up viewings.
“This is getting a bit ahead of ourselves, but a simultaneous detection of an FRB and a gravitational wave event would be – this is a technical term – totally bananas”, Williams said. Now, scientists can learn more about the most cataclysmic crashes between massive objects like black holes.
So what does all this tell us about how FRBs are formed?
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When Evan Keane calculated the amount of matter, he found it matching perfectly with the high theoretical calculations. Scientists used to discover them years after they happened, so they were unable to determine the source or cause of the bursts.
