An international team of scientists collaborated to produce the first Fast Radio Burst portrait using data from the Green Bank Telescope.
Published in the journal Nature, the new study detailed a Fast Radio Burst, which emits highly powerful radio waves in a short amount of time. But so far, astronomers have only ever detected 15 bursts and have yet to pinpoint where they come from.
"We now know that the energy from this particular burst passed through a dense magnetized field shortly after it formed," study lead author Kiyoshi Masui, an astronomer with the University of British Columbia, said in a press release. "This significantly narrows down the source's environment and type of event that triggered the burst--and means the source of the pulse likely resides within a star-forming nebula or the remnant of a supernova."
Fast Radio Bursts deal massive amounts of energy, more than what the sun can manage in hundreds of thousands of years.
"Taken together, these remarkable data reveal more about an FRB than we have ever seen before and give us important constraints on these mysterious events," Masui said. "We also have an exciting new tool to search through otherwise overwhelming archival data to uncover more examples and get closer to truly understanding their nature."
The researchers called the burst they mapped "FRB 110523" and determined it originated six billion light years from Earth, at the most.
"Astronomers in particular, we love a mystery," Masui said in another press release. "That's the compelling thing about these. You have these phenomena that are very energetic, appear to be coming from half way across the Universe, and we just have no idea what they are."
