A MYSTERIOUS short pulse of radio energy picked up by astronomers has been traced to a dwarf galaxy more than three billion light years away.
Dubbed a Fast Radio Burst (FRB), it is one of just 18 known examples of a phenomenon that has puzzled scientists since 2007.
FRBs are highly energetic but very short-lived bursts of radio waves lasting no more than a millisecond.
The first was discovered in 2007 by scientists scouring archived data from Australia’s Parkes radio telescope.
Since then 17 more FRBs have been identified but only one, spotted in 2012 by astronomers at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, has recurred repeatedly.
By studying nine bursts from this FRB over a period of six months, astronomers were able to home in on its exact position.
FRB 121102 was pinpointed using the Very Large Array (VLA), a multi-antenna radio telescope operated by the US National Science Foundation.
Its location coincided with that of a faint dwarf galaxy far, far away – a distance of more than three billion light years from Earth.
Dr Shriharsh Tendulkar, a member of the team from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, said: “Before we knew the distance to any FRBs, several proposed explanations for their origins said they could be coming from within or near our own Milky Way galaxy. We now have ruled out those explanations, at least for this FRB.”
Adding to the mystery, the FRB appeared to be accompanied by a stream of ongoing, persistent, weaker radio emissions.
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