Fast Radio Burst: astronomers spot powerful phenomenon detected in the depths of space

Astronomers have detected the most distant fast radio burst (FRB) to date in a galaxy so far away, that its light takes eight billion years to reach Earth.

The international team spotted a remote blast of cosmic radio waves using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope which lasted less than a millisecond. The findings are published in the Science journal.

The FRB released the equivalent of the Sun’s total emission over 30 years, in a tiny fraction of a second making it also one of the most energetic ever observed.

FRBs are super intense, millisecond-long bursts of radio waves produced by unidentified sources in the distant cosmos and can be used to measure the missing matter between galaxies, providing a new way to weigh the Universe. Current methods of estimating the mass of the Universe give conflicting answers and challenge the standard model of cosmology.

Ryan Shannon, a professor at the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, who also co-led the study, said: “If we count up the amount of normal matter in the Universe – the atoms that we are all made of – we find that more than half of what should be there today is missing.

“We think that the missing matter is hiding in the space between galaxies, but it may just be so hot and diffuse that it’s impossible to see using normal techniques.”

He added: “Fast radio bursts sense this ionised material.

“Even in space that is nearly perfectly empty they can ‘see’ all the electrons, and that allows us to measure how much stuff is between the galaxies.”

The burst, named FRB 20220610A, was discovered in June last year by the ASKAP radio telescope in Australia.

Stuart Ryder, an astronomer from Macquarie University in Australia and the co-lead author of the study, said: “Using ASKAP’s array of dishes, we were able to determine precisely where the burst came from. Then we used ESO’s VLT in Chile to search for the source galaxy, finding it to be older and further away than any other FRB source found to date and likely within a small group of merging galaxies.”