They detect the farthest fast radio burst or FRB captured so far, 8 billion light years away

Fast radio bursts (in English Fast Radio Burst or FRB), mysterious signals or bursts of very high energy that are being captured by telescopes around the world since 2007, continue to intrigue astronomers, who have not yet been able to determine the origin of these cosmic phenomena that manifest themselves as very fleeting radio pulses. Now, they have just detected the most distant FRB among those discovered so far, as they calculate that it is 8,000 million light years from Earth. That is, they are so far away that their light takes 8,000 million years to reach us.

The details of this record-breaking FRB studied from Australia with the ASKAP radio telescope and from Chile with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) are described this Thursday in the journal Science.

It is one of the most powerful terrestrial telescopes in the world, and its discoverers believe that current telescopes will not be able to capture energetic bursts farther away than this one located 8 billion light years away, which they have named FRB 20220610A.

The galaxy from which this burst comes seems to be located within a small group of galaxies that interact with each other. It was detected on June 10, 2022 and in this cosmic phenomenon that lasted milliseconds, an energy equivalent to that emitted by our sun in 30 years was emitted, according to the comparison offered by the authors to show how energetic these bursts are.. That first detection with the ASKAP telescope made it possible to identify the direction from which it came, and they subsequently used the VLT to search for the galaxy in which it originated, discovering that it was the most distant and oldest fast radio burst that had been located so far.

“Although we still do not know what causes these massive bursts of energy, the article confirms that fast radio bursts are common events in the cosmos and that we will be able to use them to detect matter between galaxies and better understand the structure of galaxies in the Universe,” he said. declared Ryan Shannon, a researcher at Swinburne University of Technology, in Australia, and one of the scientists who led this research.

And in addition to the scientific interest that these fast radio bursts arouse on their own, scientists consider that they can be very useful for other astronomical research.. Thus, in this work they confirm they can be used to study the 'weight' of the universe by measuring the “lost matter” between galaxies. This idea of using these energetic phenomena to measure the weight of the universe was first demonstrated by Australian astronomer Jean-Pierre 'JP' Macquart in a study published in the journal Nature in 2020.

According to the authors of this study, current methods for estimating the mass of the Universe are giving contradictory answers and challenging the standard model of cosmology.. “If we count the amount of ordinary matter in the Universe (the atoms we are made of) we find that more than half of what should be there today is missing,” explains Shannon.. His hypothesis, he adds, is that “the missing matter is hidden in the space between galaxies, but it may be so hot and diffuse that it is impossible to see it using normal techniques. Fast radio bursts detect this ionized material. Even in a space that is almost completely empty, they can see all the electrons, and that allows us to measure how much matter there is between the galaxies.