Antennas of CSIRO’s Australian SKA Pathfinder with the Milky Way overhead (CSIRO)
Reported in 2018, it would appear that researchers have located the source of the most proximate ‘fast radio burst’ [a powerful yet enigmatic radio flash generated from space] ever transmitted to planet Earth ever.
The team using the CSIRO telescope in Western Australia believe it was delivered from ESO 601-G036, a galaxy 100 million light years away.
Other bursts have been detected emanating from far across the universe as bright pulses of radio emission milliseconds in duration, which release as much energy as the Sun does in 80 years.
Elizabeth Mahony of The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) says that ESO 601-G036 is of a similar size to the only known source of the mysterious bursts.
Dr Mahony said: ‘We might actually be able to solve the mystery of what causes these fast radio bursts.’
Some experts have suggested that these 'bursts' could be transmissions from extraterrestrials, or be created by the engines of interstellar spacecraft.
Theories range from highly magnetised neutron stars blasted by gas streams from a nearby super-massive black hole, to signatures of technology developed by an advanced civilisations.
Lead author Dr Ryan Shannon from Swinburne University of Technology said, "
We’ve found 20 fast radio bursts in a year, almost doubling the number detected worldwide since they were discovered in 2007.
"Using the new technology of the Australia Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), we’ve also proved that fast radio bursts are coming from the other side of the universe rather than from our own galactic neighbourhood."
CSIRO’s Dr. Keith Bannister, who engineered the systems that detected the bursts, observed,
"The telescope has a whopping field of view of 30 square degrees, 100 times larger than the full Moon."
"And, by using the telescope’s dish antennas in a radical way, with each pointing at a different part of the sky, we observed 240 square degrees all at once – about a thousand times the area of the full Moon. ASKAP is astoundingly good for this work."
Dr. Shannon is comvinced that we now know that fast radio bursts originate from about halfway across the universe but we still don’t know what causes them or which galaxies they come from.
The team’s next challenge is to identify the locations of 'bursts' at points of the sky.