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Astronomers detect the brightest fast radio burst of all time | The dazzling “RBFLOAT” radio burst, originating in a nearby galaxy, offers the clearest view yet of the environment around these mysterious flashes.
Astronomers detected the brightest fast radio burst ever seen. The dazzling “RBFLOAT” radio burst, originating nearby in the Ursa Major constellation, offers the clearest view yet of the environment around these mysterious flashes.
“Cosmically speaking, this fast radio burst is just in our neighborhood,” says Kiyoshi Masui, associate professor of physics and affiliate of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. That notion was put to rest as the CHIME Outrigger telescopes focused in on the flash and pinned down its location to NGC4141 — a spiral galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major about 130 million light years away, which happens to be surprisingly close to our own Milky Way. While it’s still a mystery as to what source could produce FRBs, scientists’ leading hypothesis points to magnetars — young neutron stars with extremely powerful magnetic fields that can spin out high-energy flares across the electromagnetic spectrum, including in the radio band.
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