An international team observed a distant burst of cosmic radio waves lasting less than a millisecond. This Fast Radio Burst (FRB) is the furthest detected yet. Its source was located near the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), in a galaxy so distant that its light would take 8 billion years to reach us. The FRB is also one of the most energetic ever observed; In a fraction of a second, it released the equivalent of 30 years of our Sun’s total output.

The discovery of the burst, called FRB 20220610A, was made by the ASKAP radio telescope in Australia last June and surpassed the previous distance record by 50 percent.

“Using the ASKAP antenna array, we were able to pinpoint where the burst was coming from,” says Stuart Ryder, an astronomer at Macquarie University in Australia and one of the lead authors of the study titled “A Bright Fast Radio Burst Probed.” Universe in Redshift 1″ and released Science.

“Then we used [VLT ESO] “We went to Chile to look for the source galaxy and found that it is older and more distant than any other FRB source found to date and is probably part of a small group of merging galaxies.”

The discovery confirms that FRBs can be used to measure the “missing” matter between galaxies, providing a new way to “weigh” the universe. Modern methods of estimating the mass of the universe give contradictory answers and challenge the standard model of cosmology.

“If we count the amount of normal matter in the universe – the atoms that make up all of us – we find that much of what should be there today is missing,” says Ryan Shannon, a professor at Swinburne University. Technology in Australia leading the research.

“We think the missing matter is hiding in the space between galaxies, but it may be so hot and diffuse that it cannot be seen by conventional methods.”

“Fast radio bursts pick up this ionized material. They can ‘see’ all the electrons even in almost empty space, allowing us to measure how much matter there is between galaxies,” says Shannon.

Finding distant FRBs is key to accurately measuring missing matter in the universe, as Australian astronomer Jean-Pierre (JP) Macquart demonstrated in 2020.

“JP showed that the further away a fast radio burst is, the more scattered gas is detected between galaxies. This is now known as the Macquart ratio. Some recent fast radio bursts appear to break this connection. Our measurements confirm that the Macquart relation is valid throughout the known universe.” beyond half of it,” Ryder says.

“Although we still don’t know what causes these massive bursts of energy, the paper confirms that fast radio bursts are a common occurrence in space and that we can use them to detect intergalactic matter and better understand the structure of galaxies.” . Universe,” says Shannon.

The result represents the limit of what can be achieved with telescopes today; But soon astronomers will have the tools to detect older, more distant explosions, identify their parent galaxies, and measure the missing matter in the universe.

The Square Kilometer Array International Observatory is currently building two radio telescopes in South Africa and Australia that will be able to find thousands of FRBs, including very distant ones that cannot be detected with current methods. ESO’s 39-metre Extremely Large Telescope, under construction in Chile’s Atacama Desert, will be one of the few telescopes capable of searching for source galaxies of the flares even more distant than FRB 20220610A.