Recent news tell us that a fast radio burst spotting results in success for the first time. FRBs are extremely high-energy astrophysical phenomena that manifest through transient radio pulses that only last a few milliseconds. Because of that, they are usually extremely hard to find or detect. Records only show 17 occurrences ever being spotted until February 2016; most of them, however, were not detected at the time of occurrence. Usually, when one would be discovered, it would be a result of looking through months and even years of recorded data being reviewed by scientists.
A fast radio burst is a staggering event; despite their very short-lived duration, they are amazingly powerful. Scientists have estimated that a phenomenon as FRB can generate as much as energy as our Sun creates in roughly 10,000 years. Their origin is just as enigmatic, even though this could very well be an effect of how difficult catching and observing one in real time is.
So far researchers hadn’t been able to detect the nature of these events – what causes them, where they come from or how they manifest. Studying pieces of data that were out of date and without having access to the kind of information you needed in order to pinpoint the origin of a fast radio burst that had occurred months ago for example was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
However, astronomers from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s Subaru telescope and the ones from Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) recently announced a breakthrough. For the first time, scientists were able to catch a fast radio burst taking place as it was taking place thanks to the preparation they had done in advance.
By setting up a system that gave the scientists an early warning whenever a signal was received, they would send out word to other observatories to zoom in to a particular spot on the sky where the FRB was detected. This system was probably inspired by NASA’s Swift space telescope that does the same, except with gamma ray bursts.
So thanks to this type of collaboration, scientists from different places on the planet were able to not only witness a fast radio burst happening, but also to pinpoint the mysterious location that it had originated from. The answer was that the FRB that had been spotted was coming from a galaxy 6 billion light years away. A galaxy that didn’t thrive in star formation, following studies showed, meaning that these phenomena could not be a result of that.
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Michael Turner
