Scientists Track Fast Radio Burst To Nearby Galaxy

Scientists have identified the source of a recently discovered fast radio burst (FRB), which is a burst of radio waves in space only milliseconds long, coming from a nearby galaxy, according to a study in Nature.

Researchers traced fast radio bursts, which can occur in a singular incident or as a repeating event, from multiple different galaxies without learning what is causing them. However, an FRB discovered in 2019 known as “180916.J0158+65” has been traced back to a place in a galaxy about half a billion light-years from Earth, much closer than any other source of FRBs discovered so far.

“The FRB is among the closest yet seen, and we even speculated that it could be a more conventional object in the outskirts of our own galaxy,” Mohit Bhardwaj, a co-author of the study and a doctoral student at McGill University, told CNN. “However, the observation proved that it’s in a relatively nearby galaxy, making it still a puzzling FRB but close enough to now study using many other telescopes.”

Benito Marcote, the study’s lead author and a support scientist at the Joint Institute for VLBI, added, “the multiple flashes that we witnessed in the first repeating FRB arose from very particular and extreme conditions inside a very tiny [dwarf] galaxy. This discovery represented the first piece of the puzzle but it also raised more questions than it solved, such as whether there was a fundamental difference between repeating and non-repeating FRBs. Now, we have localized a second repeating FRB, which challenges our previous ideas on what the source of these bursts could be.”