Imagine a radio emission so powerful that it released as much energy in a fraction of a second as our Sun releases over 30 years. Yet unlike our massive and nearby Sun, this radio emission known as FRB 20220610A is tiny and comes from 8 billion light years away, as detailed in the journal Science. Its source is in fact a mystery, as this is a fast radio burst (FRB): an intense, extremely brief flash of radio emission. Intriguingly, this is the most distant FRB ever discovered.
"We now know that energetic FRBs can be produced in the distant Universe," study co-author Ryan Shannon, a scientist at Swinburne University of Technology's Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, told Salon by email. "This demonstrates that FRBs are indeed extreme." Shannon detailed how the team of researchers utilized the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) in order to pinpoint a burst that they suspected might have originated from a very distant galaxy. After this was accomplished, they then utilized the Very Large Telescope in order to locate the host galaxy, at which point they "saw that the light from it had been stretched by a factor of two, meaning the burst had traveled 8 billion years between when it was emitted and when we received it at ASKAP. The burst was also very bright and energetic."
