Fast radio burst

She's already trained as an astronaut, but she hasn't got a chance to fly yet.

Well, it just so happens that courtesy of the Goddard Space Flight Centre, I have a feature here called how the Hubble Space Telescope has helped track down a phenomena called fast radio bursts.

Let's take a listen.

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are extraordinary events that generate as much energy in a thousandth of a second as the Sun does in an entire year.

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have traced the locations of five brief, powerful radio blasts to the spiral arms of five distant galaxies.

Because these radio pulses disappear in much less than the blink of an eye, researchers have had a hard time tracking down where they come from and what causes them.

There is a tantalizing hypothesis connecting them, yes.

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are these immensely powerful millisecond duration flashes of radio waves originating from deep space.

Their origin remains one of astronomy's greatest unresolved mysteries.

Okay.

Several theorists have noted that the predicted radio components of a rebounding Planck star explosion beautifully match the energetic and temporal profiles of certain FRBs.

Wow.

If this connection holds, every time a radio telescope detects an FRB, we might literally be watching a 13 billion-year-old quantum time capsule finally bursting open, releasing pristine primordial matter and geometry waves from the very dawn of time.

It reaches us constantly through radiation, particles, and gravity.

Fast radio bursts can flash with enormous power in milliseconds.

A fast radio burst is over almost as soon as it begins.

The signal lasts only a few milliseconds.

The source may be violent, compact, and magnetic, but the journey is just as valuable.

Each burst is a brief message that has crossed enormous emptiness and arrived with information hidden in its timing.

Some fast radio bursts repeat from the same mysterious source.

The discovery of repeating bursts changed the mystery.

Exactly.

What is it about FRBs that excites you so much?

That, uh, two decades ago we didn't know they existed.

Yeah.

You said-

Yes

... you have a whole chapter on FRBs.

Yes.

So the new work, published Tuesday the 8th of September in Nature Astronomy, led by Kriti Sharma at Caltech with Vikram Ravi, Liam Connor, and Elizabeth Krause at the University of Arizona among the co-authors.

109 fast radio bursts, each localized to a host galaxy so it has a redshift as well as a dispersion measure, out to a redshift of about 0.3.

Relatively local deliberately because that's where feedback effects are most measurable.

Most of the bursts come from the Deep Synoptic Array, the DSA 110, a Caltech instrument at Owens Valley in California built to catch these things and pin them to a galaxy in real time.

Ravi's assessment is blunt.

It'll be a game changer.

Sharma's is that they've established fast radio bursts as a leading probe of the distribution of matter in the universe and that the data can now sharpen experiments asking about dark matter, dark energy, and the mass of the neutrino.

For something that was a single unexplained blip in an Australian archive 19 years ago, that's quite a promotion.