FRB tagged posts

Observations by the NSF’s Jansky Very Large Array, pictured here, show that a suspected fast radio burst afterglow is actually radio emission from an active galactic nucleus. Credit: NRAO

Last Feb a team of astronomers reported detecting an afterglow from a mysterious event called a fast radio burst, which would pinpoint the precise position of the burst’s origin, a longstanding goal in studies of these mysterious events. These findings were quickly called into question by follow-up observations. New research by Harvard astronomers Peter Williams and Edo Berger shows that the radio emission believed to be an afterglow actually originated from a distant galaxy’s core and was unassociated with the fast radio burst.

“Part of the scientific process is investigating findings to see if they hold...

The infrared image on the left shows the field of view of the Parkes radio telescope with the area where the signal came from marked in cyan. On the right are successive zoom-ins on that area. At the bottom right is the Subaru optical image of the FRB galaxy, with the superimposed elliptical regions showing the location of the fading 6-day afterglow seen with ATCA. Credit: © D. Kaplan (UWM), E. F. Keane (SKAO)

An international research team including Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany used a radio and optical telescopes to identify the precise location of a fast radio burst (FRB) in a distant galaxy, allowing them to conduct a unique census of the Universe’s matter content.They confirmed current cosmological models of the distribution of matter in the Universe.

On A...