beecee Posted June 27, 2019 Posted June 27, 2019 https://phys.org/news/2019-06-astronomers-history.html Cosmic waves discovery could unlock mysteries of intergalactic space: Scientists were celebrating a groundbreaking astronomical discovery Thursday that they say could pave the way for mapping the outer reaches of the universe. An Australian-led team of international astronomers have determined for the first time the precise source of a powerful, one-off burst of cosmic radio waves. They have pinpointed it to a massive galaxy billions of light years away, with properties that upend what scientists previously thought they knew about the formation of mysterious fast radio bursts (FRBs). "This result is highly anticipated within the astronomy community," Casey Law, an astronomer at UC Berkeley who was not involved in the study told AFP. The findings, published in the journal Science, are among the most significant since the discovery in 2007 of FRBs, which flash for only a micro-instant but can emit as much energy in a millisecond as the Sun does in 10,000 years. more at link..... the paper: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/06/26/science.aaw5903 A single fast radio burst localized to a massive galaxy at cosmological distance: Abstract: Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are brief radio emissions from distant astronomical sources. Some are known to repeat, but most are single bursts. Non-repeating FRB observations have had insufficient positional accuracy to localize them to an individual host galaxy. We report the interferometric localization of the single pulse FRB 180924 to a position 4 kpc from the center of a luminous galaxy at redshift 0.3214. The burst has not been observed to repeat. The properties of the burst and its host are markedly different from the only other accurately localized FRB source. The integrated electron column density along the line of sight closely matches models of the intergalactic medium, indicating that some FRBs are clean probes of the baryonic component of the cosmic web.
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