The first FRB was discovered in 2007, since when scientists have been working towards finding the source of their origin. Essentially, FRBs are bright bursts of radio waves (radio waves can be produced by astronomical objects with changing magnetic fields) whose durations lie in the millisecond-scale, because of which it is difficult to detect them and determine their position in the sky.
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| Credit: NRAO Outreach/T. Jarrett (IPAC/Caltech); B. Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF |
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one of space's most intriguing mysteries. They are extremely powerful, generating as much energy as hundreds of millions of Suns. But they are also extremely short, lasting just milliseconds; and most of them only occur once, without warning. This means they can't be predicted, so it's not like astronomers are able to plan observations. Unless a radio telescope - which has a relatively narrow field-of-view - is looking at exactly the right section of the sky when one of these bursts fires, that burst is going to be missed.
In November 2018, CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) detected a new fast radio burst, an enigmatic blast of cosmic radio waves lasting less than a millisecond. Follow-up observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope and other telescopes identified not only the host galaxy of the event, named FRB 181112, but also a bright galaxy in front of it. Now astronomers have analyzed the signal from FRB 181112 to characterize the diffuse gas in the halo of the foreground galaxy.
Reference: Australian SKA Pathfinder Telescope, ESO,NASA
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