Astronomers detect most distant fast radio burst to date | Science & Technology

The discovery of the burst, named FRB 20220610A, was made in June last year by the ASKAP radio telescope in Australia [1] and it smashed the team’s previous distance record by 50 percent.

“Using ASKAP’s array of dishes, we were able to determine precisely where the burst came from,” says Stuart Ryder, an astronomer from Macquarie University in Australia and the co-lead author of the study published today in Science. “Then we used [ESO’s VLT] in Chile to search for the source galaxy, [2] finding it to be older and further away than any other FRB source found to date and likely within 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.

Current methods of estimating the mass of the Universe are giving conflicting answers and challenging the standard model of cosmology. “If we count up the amount of normal matter in the Universe — the atoms that we are all made of — we find that more than half of what should be there today is missing,” says Ryan Shannon, a professor at the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, who also co-led the study. “We think that the missing matter is hiding in the space between galaxies, but it may just be so hot and diffuse that it’s impossible to see using normal techniques.”

“Fast radio bursts sense this ionised material. Even in space that is nearly perfectly empty they can ‘see’ all the electrons, and that allows…

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