(NewsNation) — In summer 2022, astronomers detected the most powerful and farthest known fast radio burst, or FRB, ever observed. Now, they know where it came from.
Researchers used the Hubble Space Telescope to trace the radio burst back to not one galaxy, but a cluster of at least seven, Northwestern University said in a Tuesday news release. The research was presented at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans.
“Without the Hubble’s imaging, it would still remain a mystery as to whether this FRB originated from one monolithic galaxy or from some type of interacting system,” said Northwestern’s Alexa Gordon, who led the study. “It’s these types of environments — these weird ones — that drive us toward a better understanding of the mystery of FRBs.”
A fast radio burst is a “fleeting blast of energy that can — for a few milliseconds — outshine an entire galaxy,” according to NASA. They can travel billions of light years but usually only last a thousandth of a second.
Hundreds have been detected over the past few years, but their sources are often unknown. Northwestern researchers used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to pinpoint the location of the one detected in 2022, dubbed FRB 20220610A. It originated when the universe was just 5 billion years old. (The universe is now about 13.8 billion years old.)
When it was detected, the FRB appeared to originate from a very distant “amorphous blob,” Northwestern said, that astronomers thought could be a “single, irregular galaxy or a group of three distant galaxies.” But the new images from Hubble show it’s a collection of at least seven that appear to be interacting with each other.
“In other words, they could be trading materials or possibly on a path to merging,” said Wen-fai Fong, the study’s co-author. “These groups of galaxies (called compact groups) are incredibly rare environments in the universe and are the densest galaxy-scale structures we know of.”
The new discovery could help astronomers build a better understanding of the universe because of the particles that radio waves interact with on their journey through space.
“Radio waves, in particular, are sensitive to any intervening material along the line of sight — from the FRB location to us,” Fong said. “That means the waves have to travel through any cloud of material around the FRB site, through its host galaxy, across the universe and finally through the Milky Way. From a time delay in the FRB signal itself, we can measure the sum of all of these contributions.”
NewsNation digital producer Cassie Buchman contributed to this report.