![]() ![]() It is the longest-lasting FRB to date, around 1,000 times longer than the average FRB. However, this new signal, labelled FRB 20191221A, can persist for up to three seconds at a time, during which, astronomers observed it emitting bursts of radio waves that repeated every 0.2 seconds in an obvious pattern. One of the things that makes this new signal stand out is that most FRBs last only a couple of milliseconds when they come to life. This radio “heartbeat,” detected by a special radio telescope in British Columbia, is described in a new paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, which explains that this phenomenon is called a fast radio burst (FRBs).įRBs are sudden bursts of strong, consistent radio waves from space that have no clear source but are detectable across huge distances. A signal consisting of fast bursts of radio waves in a clear pattern has been detected emanating from deep space - and astronomers believe it could be used to measure the expansion of the universe in the future. The team's research is detailed in a paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.įollow us, or on Facebook and Instagram. This could in turn open up a new way of using long-wavelength radio telescopes to probe the evolution of stars and galaxies and how the early universe evolved into the cosmos we see around us in its current era. The team of astronomers believes that the detection of the hydrogen line signal from this early galaxy demonstrates that it is feasible to observe radio signals from other distant galaxies during the early epoch of the universe. "This effectively results in the magnification of the signal by a factor of 30, allowing the telescope to pick it up," co-author and Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the Indian Institute of Science, Nirupam Roy, said. In the case of SDSSJ0826+5630, the radio wave signal was magnified by another galaxy between the early galaxy acting as a lensing body. Galaxies in early universe were surprisingly diverse, James Webb Space Telescope finds Milky Way's 'poor old heart' could reveal how our galaxy formed Astronomers weighed our Milky Way, and it's lighter than expected That means a tremendously massive object like a black hole or galaxy causes extreme curvature in spacetime just as a bowling ball would cause the extreme curvature of the rubber sheet in the analogy. General relativity suggests that objects with mass warp spacetime similar to how a ball placed on a stretched rubber sheet would weigh it down in the center, and just like in that analogy, the greater the mass, the more extreme the curvature. Gravity as a window to the early universe However, the team was able to make the record-breaking detection using a phenomenon predicted as part of the theory of general relativity, Einstein's geometric theory of gravity, first suggested in 1915. That means telescopes here on Earth need a natural boost to see long-wavelength, low-energy radio waves like the hydrogen line signal. ![]() The difficulty in spotting these wavelengths from more distant galaxies is due to the fact that as electromagnetic radiation from early galaxies travels vast distances to Earth, the expansion of the universe stretches its wavelength and causes its energy to reduce. Until now, it's only been possible to capture this particular signal from a galaxy nearby, limiting our knowledge to those galaxies closer to Earth." "A galaxy emits different kinds of radio signals. "It's the equivalent to a look-back in time of 8.8 billion years," lead author and McGill University Department of Physics Post-Doctoral cosmologist Arnab Chakraborty, said of the breakthrough in a statement.
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