Scientists find 'weird' origin of signal that traveled through space

Scientists have identified the 'weird' origin of a high-energy burst of radio waves that traveled eight billion years through space before reaching Earth. 

The signal, also known as a fast radio burst (FRB), is one of hundreds of fleeting blasts of energy detected over the years that some astronomers have speculated could be alien life trying to contact our planet. 

While scientists do not know the mechanism behind this extraordinary phenomenon, they have found that the FRB came from a cluster of galaxies that existed when the universe was only five billion years old.

Using NASA's Hubble Telescope, the team peered into deep space and snapped a clear image of the tightly packed galaxies. 

The FRB, dubbed FRB 20220610A, was found to be the most powerful and farthest ever detected when astronomers intercepted it in 2022.

However, researchers have since been baffled about the origins of the burst of energy. 

Now the team has identified seven tightly packed galaxies as the home of the FRB. 

'None have ever been seen in such a compact group,' according to astronomer Yuxin (Vic) Dong, who worked on the team at Northwestern University studying FRB 20220610A's curious origins. 

'Its birthplace is truly rare,' she said.

Alexa Gordon, who led the new study at Northwestern, agreed, adding: 'It's these types of environments, these weird ones, that are driving us toward better understanding the mystery of FRBs.'

These oddly bright flashes of light, registering in the radio band of the electromagnetic spectrum, appear temporarily and randomly from space.

Possibly originating from black holes, neutron stars or even aliens, they range from a fraction of a millisecond to a few seconds before vanishing without a trace.

And the tightly packed galaxies spotted in the latest research would be easier for a growing extraterrestrial civilization to planet hop, astronomer Brian Lacki argued in Cambridge's International Journal of Astrobiology.

FRB 20220610A's origin in a dense cluster of galaxies would mean that any advanced aliens would have a dramatic head start setting-up their own Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) radio.

SETI is a program that looks for radio waves and optical signals in the universe that could be signs of alien technology.

But this dense cluster of galaxies could, instead, one day prove an alternate theory: that FRBs are produced by the explosive collisions of neutron stars and other celestial bodies.

Prior to the imaging from Hubble, which was published earlier this year, astrophysicists and astronomers had been unclear on whether or not the source of the burst was one giant, amorphously shaped galaxy or a collection of more modestly sized galaxies orbiting each other.

Read More

Are aliens trying to contact Earth? Scientists discover twisted fields around a fast radio burst - in breakthrough that could finally reveal the source of the mysterious signals 

'Without the Hubble's imaging, it would still remain a mystery as to whether this FRB originated from one monolithic galaxy or from some type of interacting system,' as Gordon put it in a NASA statement.

Collisions and other interactions between celestial bodies in these seven galaxies could be triggering extreme star formations, according to Gordon.

Chaotic activity in this busy cluster of galaxies, in other words, could mean that this oddly powerful, distant FRB is energy launched from a lighting-up of newborn stars.

Northwestern astronomer Wen-fai Fong, who also worked on the project, noted that the new Hubble images appear to show oblong shapes or 'tidal tales' trailing some of these seven galaxies, suggesting that they may have had collisions.

'There are some signs that the group members are 'interacting,'' Fong said.

'In other words, they could be trading materials or possibly on a path to merging.' 

The initial discovery of FRB 20220610A was made in June of 2022 by the ASKAP radio telescope in Australia. It was later confirmed with the help of the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT).

It smashed the research team's previous distance record by 50 percent.

'Using ASKAP's array of dishes, we were able to determine precisely where the burst came from,' said astronomer Dr Stuart Ryder, an adjunct fellow from Macquarie University in Australia whose team first identified the burst in 2022. 

Astronomers and astrophysicists are hoping that these kinds of distant FRBs — even if none of them prove to be encoded alien messages — could help find hard to see traces of gaseous clouds and other hidden matter deep out in space.

This concept originated with the late Australian astronomer Jean-Pierre ('J-P') Macquart in 2020, who proposed a method of using FRBs to accurately measure the universe's missing matter.

'J-P showed that the further away a fast radio burst is, the more diffuse gas it reveals between the galaxies,' according to Ryder, 'now known as 'the Macquart relation.''

The team at Northwestern is exploring this possible use of the new data pulled from FRB 20220610A and its weird, distant galaxy of origin as well.  

'Radio waves, in particular, are sensitive to any intervening material along the line of sight — from the FRB location to us,' Fong noted. 'That means the waves have to travel through any cloud of material around the FRB site, through its host galaxy, across the universe, and finally through the Milky Way.' 

'From a time delay in the FRB signal itself,' she said, 'we can measure the sum of all of these contributions.'

FAST RADIO BURSTS ARE BRIEF RADIO EMISSIONS FROM SPACE WHOSE ORIGIN IS UNKNOWN

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are radio emissions that appear temporarily and randomly, making them not only hard to find, but also hard to study.

The mystery stems from the fact it is not known what could produce such a short and sharp burst.

This has led some to speculate they could be anything from stars colliding to artificially created messages.

The first FRB was spotted, or rather 'heard' by radio telescopes, back in 2001 but wasn't discovered until 2007 when scientists were analysing archival data.

But it was so temporary and seemingly random that it took years for astronomers to agree it wasn't a glitch in one of the telescope's instruments. 

Researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics point out that FRBs can be used to study the structure and evolution of the universe whether or not their origin is fully understood.

A large population of faraway FRBs could act as probes of material across gigantic distances. 

This intervening material blurs the signal from the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the left over radiation from the Big Bang. 

A careful study of this intervening material should give an improved understanding of basic cosmic constituents, such as the relative amounts of ordinary matter, dark matter and dark energy, which affect how rapidly the universe is expanding.

FRBs can also be used to trace what broke down the 'fog' of hydrogen atoms that pervaded the early universe into free electrons and protons, when temperatures cooled down after the Big Bang.