In summer 2022, astronomers detected the most powerful fast radio burst (FRB) ever observed. And coming from a location that dates halfway back to the Big Bang, it also was the farthest known FRB spotted to date.
Using images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the researchers traced the FRB back to not one galaxy but a group of at least seven galaxies. The galaxies in the collection appear to be interacting with one another—perhaps even on the path to a potential merger. Such groups of galaxies are rare and possibly led to conditions that triggered the FRB.
The unexpected finding might challenge scientific models of how FRBs are produced and what produces them.
“Without the Hubble’s imaging, it would still remain a mystery as to whether this FRB originated from one monolithic galaxy or from some type of interacting system,” said Northwestern’s Alexa Gordon, who led the study. “It’s these types of environments—these weird ones—that drive us toward a better understanding of the mystery of FRBs.”
Gordon presents this research during the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society held 7–11 January, in New Orleans, Louisiana. A corresponding paper is also published on the arXiv preprint server.
2024-01-09 20:00:04
Original from phys.org rnrn