“We were lucky enough to be able to see that tiny spot in the sky for that one millisecond after traveling for eight billion years to catch the pulse,” said Shannon, co-author of a study describing the discovery in the journal Science. Were staying.”
The FRB handily beats the previous record holder, which was about five billion light years away, he said.
The pulse was so powerful that – in less than a millisecond – it released as much energy as the Sun emits in 30 years.
Shannon said there could be hundreds of thousands of FRBs flashing across the sky every day.
But about a thousand have been detected so far, and scientists have only been able to figure out where only 50 came from – which is crucial to understanding them.
To find out where the latest radio burst – called FRB 20220610A – came from, researchers turned to the Very Large Telescope in Chile.
It found that the signal originated from a particularly sticky galaxy that was probably merging with one or two other galaxies, which in turn could have created the strange magnetar.
Shannon stressed that this was just the team’s “best guess”.
FRBs have been found to come from unexpected places, including from within our own galaxy, he said, so “the jury is still out” as to what causes them.
In addition to trying to uncover the mysteries of FRBs, scientists hope to use them as a tool to shed light on other mysteries of the universe.
