(Newswire.net — July 1, 2019) –A great breakthrough has occurred in astrophysics as scientists succeed to pinpoint the exact place in the universe from where they picked up radio-waves.
The radio-waves were picked up by radio-telescopes from Earth more than a decade ago and tracing their origin pointed to a location some 3.6 billion light years away. Scientists hoped that this find will tell us more about the composition of the universe.
Australian Square Kilometers Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) picked up a radio-wave that was hidden in the singular milliseconds-long flash. Such a signal is almost impossible to find even with ASKAP that takes 10 trillion raw measurements per second across a patch of sky.
The radio-wave named FRB 180924 was a needle in the cosmic haystack and its occurrence was impossible to predict.
“This is the big breakthrough that the field has been waiting for since astronomers discovered fast radio bursts (FRBs) in 2007,” said astro-engineer Keith Bannister of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in a statement.
Scientists measured delays of the radio-signal burst that hit ASKAP’s 36 dishes. They were successful in creating a 2D map and later discovered enough data to complete a full 3D map with the exact location of the wave’s origin.
Scientists previously traced FRB 121102 to a region of a dwarf galaxy some three billion light-years away. This signal bursts repeatedly, making it far easier to track down its origin. It was not disclosed if scientists calculated the space-time distortion near blackpolls the signal passed by.
“FRBs from 121102 originate in a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light years from Earth, but the nature of the object emitting them is unknown,” the press release stated.
Scientists say that thanks to this find they are now able to detect the volume of gas the burst passed through on its way to Earth, providing more insights about the composition of the universe, which will also give more insight into the perplexing space between galaxies.