The global team found out the oldest fast radio burst and still distant, about eight billion years old, as published in the journal ‘Science’. The discovery beats the team’s previous record by 50% and confirms it Fast radio bursts (FRBs) can be used to measure the “missing” matter between galaxies.
The source of the burst is a group of two or three galaxies that are merging, supporting current theories about the cause of fast radio bursts.. The team also showed that eight billion years This is the maximum time for which we can expect and locate fast radio flashes with current telescopes.
On 10 June 2022, CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope, located atWajarri Yamaji territory in Australia, detected a fast radio burst, produced by a cosmic event that released within milliseconds, equivalent to the total emission of our Sun in 30 years.
“Thanks to the array of ASKAP satellite dishes, we were able to pinpoint exactly where the explosion came from,” explains Dr. Stuart Ryder of Macquarie University and first author of the paper. Next, we used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile to search for the source galaxy and found it to be older and more distant than any other FRB source found so far, and probably within reach of a small group of merging galaxies.”
A fast radio signal named FRB 20220610A reaffirmed the concept of weighing the universe using FRB data. This was first demonstrated by Australian astronomer Jean-Pierre “JP” Macquart in a paper published in “Nature” in 2020.
“JP showed it The further away a fast radio burst is, the more diffuse gas between galaxies it reveals -explains Doctor Ryder-. This is now known as the Macquart relation. “Some recent fast radio bursts appear to have broken this relationship, and our measurements confirm that the Macquart relationship holds beyond the center of the known universe,” he points out.
About 50 FRBs have been detected to date, almost half thanks to ASKAP. The authors suggest that we should be able to detect thousands of them across the sky and at even greater distances.
“Although we still don’t know what causes these massive bursts of energy, the paper confirms that fast radio bursts are common phenomena in the universe and that we can use them to detect matter between galaxies and better understand the structure of the universe.” Professor Ryan said. Shannon of Swinburne University of Technology and co-author of the study – and soon we will have the tools to do it.” “ASKAP is currently the best radio telescope for detecting and localizing FRBs.
The SKA International Telescopes, currently under construction in Western Australia and South Africa, will allow astronomers to locate even older and more distant FRBs. The nearly 40-metre mirror of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, currently under construction in the high, dry Chilean desert, will then be needed to study its home galaxies.
The project was a global effort with researchers from ASTRON (Netherlands), Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso (Chile), Kavli Institute for Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Japan), SKA Observatory (United Kingdom), Northwestern University, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz (United States of America).
Current methods of estimating the mass of the universe provide conflicting answers and challenge the Standard Model of cosmology.. “If we count the amount of normal matter in the universe (the atoms of which we are all composed), we find that more than half of what should be there is missing. today,” says associate Shannon. We believe it “The missing matter is hidden in the space between galaxies, but may be so hot and diffuse that it cannot be seen with conventional techniques.”
“Fast radio bursts detect this ionized material. Even in space, which is almost perfectly empty, they can ‘see’ all the electrons, and this allows us to measure how much matter is between galaxies,” he adds.
CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope is located at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, CSIRO’s Murchison Radio Astronomical Observatory, in Western Australia, about 800 kilometers north of Perth.
Currently, 16 countries are partners of the SKA observatory, which is building two radio telescopes. SKA-Low (low frequency telescope) – on the same site as ASKAP – will consist of 131,072 two meter antennas, while SKA-Mid (medium frequency telescope) in South Africa will contain 197 satellite dishes.
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The Very Large Telescope (VLT) has four eight-meter mirrors and is managed by the European Southern Observatory, located on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. Australia is a strategic partner of ESO, providing Australian astronomers with access to the VLT and the opportunity to contribute new technologies to it.
Australian astronomers also hope to have access to ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) when it becomes operational later this decade. The ELT will be able to provide images 15 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope.
