Scientists have found a powerful blast of energy coming to us from the early universe.
The signal is a fast radio burst, one of the most mysterious objects in the universe. They are incredibly short, very powerful bursts of energy – but scientists still do not know where they come from, with speculation ranging from extreme astrophysical objects to alien technology.
Now, astronomers have picked up the most distant example ever found. It travelled for 10 billion years across the universe before reaching Earth, meaning that it originated just three billion years after the Big Bang, more than double the previous record.
Astronomers hope that it will not only shed light on the mysterious origins of such FRBs, but also that it could be a vital way to study the evolution of galaxies and the invisible matter between them. The signal carries information about the parts of the cosmos that it travelled through on its way to us.
“This is an extraordinary glimpse into the distant Universe,” said Manisha Caleb from the University of Sydney.
“We have caught a fast radio burst from a time when the Universe was only about three billion years old, and we have used that brief flash of radio light to learn about the matter it has travelled through over billions of years.”
The researchers not only picked up the signal, but also found the galaxy that had produced it. It is an unusual part of the universe.
“The galaxy hosting this burst is surprisingly small, metal-poor and undergoing a very active episode of star formation,” said Laura Driessen, a co-author, also from the University of Sydney.
“That gives us an important clue about the environments in which FRBs are born and shows that these brief radio flashes can tell us not only about the distant universe, but also about how galaxies and their stellar populations evolve.”
The finding helps add to our understanding of where the mysterious blasts may come from. It suggests that at least some of them are sent out by young magnetars, which are neutron stars that are formed when massive stars explode in a supernova.
The host galaxy is young and creating large number of stars. That suggests that it would be more likely to have come from a magnetar than being evidence for other theories, which point to the merging of older neutron stars.
The blast has been named FRB 20240304B was discovered by the MeerTRAP Project, which uses South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope. Astronomers then used observations from Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope to find the galaxy that it came from.
The work is reported in a new paper, ‘A fast radio burst at redshift 2, three billion years after the Big Bang’, published in the journal Science.