10-billion-year-old radio energy burst offers clues to the universe

So let's start with the big space story of the week, and, um, I really don't understand these things, so can you make it simple? [laughs] What was this flash of energy that was detected, and why is it special?

So really exciting about this.

We actually have no idea what the flash is.

Um, we've detected fast radio bursts since 2007, but we still have no idea what causes a fast radio burst.

They're just these incredibly bright bursts of energy in radio wavelengths, so the same wavelengths that I'm speaking to you, that people are hearing us talk about this incredible result, and it's just traveled through the distance of the universe to reach our telescopes here.

But the one that's so exciting that happened and was, uh, announced yesterday is super exciting because it might help us understand what these FRBs actually are.

Because it's come from so far in the early universe, we're hoping that this could help us narrow down that perhaps this is a really particular type of star called a magnetar.

Wow.

Um, if I ask you this question, will I understand the answer? H- how, how do you know-

[laughs]

... that it, it's 10 billion years old? How do you know that?

Yeah, so as the, the light's coming to us, as this fast radio burst happened, as you said, billions of years ago, way in the early universe when it was just three billion years old, as it travels towards us, it kind of encodes everything it travels through.

So we get to see just all the matter it's traveled through.

All the light is, is changed, encoding all of that information into the flash.

So when we finally detect it here on Earth, we can actually see just how far it's traveled based on all of the information that's coded into that flash.

So this one, when we detected it, had a huge amount of information coded into it, and immediately that was a sign that it come from so much further away than any other FRB we've seen.

I was reading something which says, "For context, when it left the source, the sun didn't exist, the solar system didn't exist, no humans existed.

Civilization formed, and we built radio telescopes, and then we just happened to look at the right patch of sky at the right time." [laughs] Is this that?

Mm-hmm.

Is that a good description?

That's the perfect way to describe it, yeah.

It sounds like pure coincidence.

It was just really lucky that we happened to be looking at the right place.

But there are also FRBs that are going off, hundreds of them in a day.

So there are lots of FRBs going around in our universe, and we really just need to be looking up to make sure we catch them.