Scientists have tracked an intense radio signal coming from deep in space to its origin – and been left shocked by what they found.
For years, researchers have been looking to explain fast radio bursts, or FRBs, which are very short and very powerful blasts energy coming from deep in space. Possible explanations have included everything from black holes to alien technology.
Researchers hope to be able to understand more about them by following them back to their original galaxies, in the hope of seeing what extreme conditions might send out such powerful blasts across the universe.
Now, scientists have tracked one of those blasts back to its home galaxy. But that galaxy is very old and dead, as well as being strangely shaped.
Previously, researchers have only found FRBs coming from much younger galaxies. As such, it breaks our existing understanding of where they might be coming from.
The discovery might mean that the mysterious cosmic events are coming from much more diverse places than we ever realised, scientists say.
“This new FRB shows us that just when you think you understand an astrophysical phenomenon, the universe turns around and surprises us,” said Northwestern’s Wen-fai Fong, a senior author on two studies reporting the new findings. “This ‘dialogue’ with the universe is what makes our field of time-domain astronomy so incredibly thrilling.”
The FRB in the new study was first spotted in February 2024. It continued to pulse through July 2024, which helped researchers to find its position in the sky.
Once that was done, researchers turned satellites towards the location – and were surprised by what they saw. Instead of a young galaxy, it was coming from one 11.3 billion years old and just two billion light years from Earth.
Scientists then simulated what conditions might be like in that galaxy. Those simulations showed that the galaxy appears to be very bright and very massive, with 100 billion times the mass of the Sun, making it the most massive FRB host galaxy to date and one of the most massive found of any kind.
The work is described in two new papers, ‘A repeating fast radio burst source in the outskirts of a quiescent galaxy” and “The massive and quiescent elliptical host galaxy of the repeating fast radio burst FRB 20240209A’, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
