A team of astronomers has uncovered the most detailed record ever of a fast radio burst.
Fast radio bursts, brief yet brilliant eruptions of cosmic radio waves, have baffled astronomers since they were first reported nearly a decade ago. Though they appear to come from the distant universe, none of these enigmatic events has revealed more than the slimmest details about how and where it formed, until now.
A new look at over 650 hours of archival data from the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope indicates that the burst originated inside a highly magnetized region of space, possibly linking it to a recent supernova or the interior of an active star-forming nebula. The findings appear in Nature.
“We now know that the energy from this FRB passed through a dense, magnetized region shortly after it formed. This significantly narrows down the source’s environment and type of event that triggered the burst,” says Kiyoshi Masui, an astronomer with the University of British Columbia and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Lasting only a fraction of a second yet packing a phenomenal amount of energy, FRBs are brief radio flashes of unknown origin that appear to come from random directions on the sky. Though only a handful have been documented previously, astronomers believe that the observable universe is rocked by thousands of these events each day.
‘Smeared Out’ Signal
The astronomers found the newly identified FRB, dubbed FRB 110523, with highly specialized software developed by Masui and his colleague Jonathan Sievers from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa.
The recorded data—a total of 40 terabytes—created a substantial analysis challenge, which was made even more difficult because the otherwise short, sharp signal of an FRB becomes “smeared out” in frequency by its journey through space.
