Science

By Robert Lea
published 3 days ago

"This result marks a turning point: instead of just detecting these mysterious flashes, we can now see exactly where they're coming from."



(Main) An illustration of CHIME/FRB and its Outriggers localizing FRB 20250316A (RBFLOAT) (Inset) RBFLOAT's host galaxy NGC 4141 as seen by MMT Observatory.

An illustration of a quadruple star system with two "failed star" brown dwarfs and two stars (Image credit: Daniëlle Futselaar/MMT Observatory)


Astronomers have discovered what may be the brightest flash of radio waves ever seen and have tracked this fast radio burst (FRB) back to its source. This feat could revolutionize theories surrounding these mysterious and rapid blasts of radiation that, in mere milliseconds, can emit as much energy as the sun does in its entire lifetime.

First spotted in 2007, FRBs have been difficult for astronomers to explain. This is because they last such a brief amount of time and only a small sample of them repeat, making follow-up investigations difficult. Though many explanations have been posited for FRBs, the leading culprits are extreme dead stars or "neutron stars" with magnetic fields so powerful they warrant a categorization of their own and are thus dubbed "magnetars."

The new FRB has been officially designated FRB 20250316A and has been given the nickname "RBFLOAT," which stands for "Radio Brightest FLash Of All Time." This unusually bright FRB was first spotted in March 2025 by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), which has been dubbed an "FRB discovery machine" thanks to its immense impact in spotting new FRBs

This is the first time the CHIME/FRB radio telescope has been used on its own to track an FRB back to its source. In this case, that source is a region just 45 light-years across – smaller than the average star cluster – in the spiral arm at the edge of NGC 4141, a galaxy about 130 million light-years away. To put that feat into context, the team behind the research compares it to spotting a quarter from a distance of 62 miles away.

More:
https://www.space.com/astronomy/brightest-ever-fast-radio-burst-challenges-assumptions-about-mysterious-blasts-of-energy-this-marks-the-beginning-of-a-new-era