Someone may
have forgotten to turn off the TV at the other end of the universe.
(IMAGE)The galaxy where the signal originated is similar in size to our own, but creates stars at a relatively slow rate. (Photo: pixelparticle/Shutterstock)
Or maybe
someone has sent us an emoji from a faraway mothership.
In other
words, we don't have a clue what transmitted the single fast radio burst
scientists picked up last week. But we do know where it came from: A galaxy
far, far away.
In a study published this week, researchers at the California Institute of Technology
claim to have traced a single radio burst back to its home nearly 8 billion
light-years away.
Fast radio
bursts, or FRBs — typically lasting anywhere from a fraction of a millisecond
to a few milliseconds — have been enshrouded in mystery since they were first
discovered in 2007. They're so powerful that they can make their way to our
neck of the universe from impossibly far away, although it's rare that we
receive them.
That's
likely to change over the next few years as new pace-scanning equipment that
specializes in FRBs comes online.
Back in
January, a newly built Canadian telescope picked up no fewer than 13 fast radio bursts, all seeming to originate some 1.5 billion light-years away. But that's
considerably easier to find than one solitary FRB.
What all
fast radio bursts have in common is mathematical regularity. They
beep-beep-beep at exactly the same intervals. But repeating FRBs are a lot
easier to pick up and trace than a single radio burst.
"Finding the locations of the one-off FRBs is challenging because it requires a radio telescope that can both discover these extremely short events and locate them with the resolving power of a mile-wide radio dish," study author and Caltech professor Vikram Ravi explained a statement.
The signal
appears to hail from a galaxy similar in size to our own, a region with such a
low rate of star formation that scientists call it a "mellow" galaxy.
A repeating
fast radio burst, by its very nature, is much easier to receive than a one-off
signal. (Photo: solar seven/Shutterstock)
The report
comes a week after scientists in Australia announced the signal's discovery,
dubbing it FRB 190523. To find that tiniest of blips in the cosmos, the
researchers sifted through vast amounts of data collected by the Australian
Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder.
Keith
Bannister, who led that study, called it "the big breakthrough that the
field has been waiting for since astronomers discovered fast radio
bursts."
And now that
researchers have zeroed in on its source, we may soon learn what caused it.
In the
meantime, that single, incredibly brief transmission can carry a universe of
data. Its odyssey across staggering distances could reveal what lies between
star systems.
"These bursts are altered by the matter they encounter in space," Jean-Pierre Macquart, the professor who authored last week's study, noted in a statement. "Now we can pinpoint where they come from, we can use them to measure the amount of matter in intergalactic space."