For years it drove scientists crazy. It was a truly inexplicable flash, pure fleeting energy that no one knew where it came from. It was the most powerful radio signal ever detected from space and no one knew what it was… until now. An international team of scientists has managed to pinpoint with great precision the exact place in the universe from which that burst came, lasting milliseconds and leaving astronomy with more questions than answers.
This discovery puts a name and an address to this signal, one of the most extreme ever recorded, and it also opens a new line of research so that we can understand one of the strangest phenomena in the cosmos.
The strangest thing ever seen
The so called fast radio bursts (FRBs) are a type of cosmic whip that arrives from far outside our galaxy and lasts only the blink of an eye, but releases so much energy that we can detect it from Earth. For years, they have been the subject of study by dozens of scientists, who have considered a huge number of theories, from collisions to neutron stars or some theories less accepted by the scientific community.
And of course, since they last such a short time and appear so randomly, it was extremely difficult to investigate what they were or where they came from.
Millimeter level localization
But this time it was different. The signal was so intense that, thanks to a network of radio telescopes and extensive mathematical analysis, researchers were able to triangulate its origin and find the exact point in space where that burst appeared.
They discovered that it came from a region within a spiral galaxy located 130 million light years from Earth. It may seem far at first glance, but not so far for scientists.
What was there when the signal exploded?
By observing that area more carefully, scientists found a very active environment, full of star forming regions, a very young, energetic and somewhat chaotic place. Exactly the type of scenario where extreme objects such as magnetars could exist, which are neutron stars with extremely intense magnetic fields. Is this the definitive cause? We still do not know, but for the first time this is not speculation without data.
A solitary signal…
As if by magic, no other signal has appeared again from that point, so we are talking about a unique event that they were able to locate purely by chance. In addition, these explosions would be unique because not all FRBs are the same. How interesting our universe is, right?
The future of astronomy
From now on, scientists hope to locate hundreds of these signals every year with much greater precision than before. This way they will be able to compare galaxies, environments and patterns, discard wild theories and finally reach conclusions that are a bit more logical. FRBs will help scientists study what materials exist in each galaxy and allow other magnetic fields to be measured.
There are still more questions
Is everything solved? Not yet, of course. And every answer opens up a new question, and this will continue until it is fully discovered what produces these flashes.