An artist’s impression (to not scale) of the trail of the quick radio burst FRB 20220610A
M. Kornmesser/European Southern Observatory
An unexplained flash of radio waves that hit Earth in 2022 came from a small group of galaxies some 8 billion gentle years away. The discovery expands our understanding of the best way in which the mysterious quick radio bursts (FRBs) can type.
To date, astronomers have found greater than 1000 FRBs, unusual blasts of radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation that streak throughout the sky in simply milliseconds. Some of the occasions repeat and have been detected flashing a number of occasions. A number one clarification is that the FRBs are generated by highly effective rotating stars referred to as magnetars – extremely magnetised, spinning cores left behind after large stars explode as supernovae.
About 50 FRBs have been pinpointed to sources in the Milky Way and different galaxies. But in 2022, astronomers discovered probably the most distant and highly effective FRB but: the non-repeating FRB 20220610A, which dates again to when the universe was solely 5 billion years previous.
Alexa Gordon at Northwestern University in Illinois led a crew that adopted up on the invention. Using the Hubble Space Telescope in April 2023, the researchers discovered that FRB 20220610A originated in a small dwarf galaxy that was half of a compact group of seven galaxies so small that your entire assortment would match inside our Milky Way. “It’s a very rare system,” says Gordon. “At the distance of this FRB, only about 0.1 to 1 per cent of galaxies are in compact groups.”
Such teams are regarded as energetic areas of star formation. This helps the magnetar clarification for FRBs, as magnetars in all probability type early in a galaxy’s evolution when sizzling and big stars explode. In compact teams, “the galaxies are interacting pretty frequently”, Gordon says. This triggers star formation that matches what we see in research of FRBs generated by sources which can be youthful and nearer to Earth.
The work was uploaded to the arXiv preprint server late final 12 months, and was additionally offered right this moment at a gathering of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans, Louisiana.
The discovery provides to the categories of environments in which we all know FRBs can exist. “The majority are in star-forming spiral galaxies,” says Gordon. “But we’ve also discovered FRBs in galaxy clusters, dwarf galaxies and a globular cluster. Adding ‘compact group’ to this list is another example of how we’re finding FRBs in diverse places.”
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