The newly discovered signal is the oldest and most distant radio burst ever detected, originating from a colliding galaxy cluster.
Simulation of a radio burst escaping a galaxy cluster and reaching the Milky Way. Photo: ESO
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) originating from ancient colliding galaxies could help astronomers unravel the mystery of the missing matter in the universe. This is the oldest and most distant FRB ever detected, proving that researchers can use the signals to effectively “weigh” the universe. FRBs are bursts of radio waves that typically last a few milliseconds. They are a puzzle in themselves, as their origin remains a mystery. The fact that this record-breaking FRB came from a group of two or three merging galaxies could help solve that mystery.
The burst, called FRB 20220610A, was detected by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a radio telescope in Western Australia. In just a few milliseconds, the FRB signal appears to release as much energy as the Sun does in 30 years. The team published their findings in the journal Science on October 19.
“Using ASKAP’s array of detectors, we were able to pinpoint exactly where the bursts came from,” said team leader Stuart Ryder, a researcher at Macquarie University. “We then used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile to search for the galactic source, finding that it was older and more distant than any previously known FRB source, likely located in a small group of merging galaxies.”
From simulations of the universe, starting with the Big Bang and ending in modern times, researchers know that half of the matter that should exist in the universe today is missing. It is not dark matter, which is invisible to humans because of its lack of interaction with light. Researchers believe that the missing matter is "normal" matter, made of atoms including protons and neutrons. Those particles are called baryons. For decades, this missing matter was undetectable with the world's largest and most sophisticated telescopes, but it has recently been suggested that it comes from the vast spaces between some galaxies.
The problem is that the missing matter is so sparsely distributed that there are about two atoms in a standard office space on Earth. Since the early 2020s, some scientists have speculated that FRBs could be used as “cosmic weigh stations” to detect the missing matter. That’s because as FRBs travel millions or billions of light years, their radiation is scattered by the missing matter. That means measuring the distance of an FRB could help determine the density of the universe, which could help locate the missing matter. Researchers have now identified the sources of 50 FRBs, and astronomers could detect thousands more at even greater distances.
An Khang (According to Space )
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