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posted by chromas on Tuesday January 07 2020, @06:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the beep-beep-beep-beep-beep dept.

A fast radio burst tracked down to a nearby galaxy:

In results published in the January 9 edition of Nature, the European VLBI Network (EVN) used eight telescopes spanning locations from the United Kingdom to China to simultaneously observe the repeating radio source known as FRB 180916.J0158+65. Using a technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), the researchers achieved a level of resolution high enough to localize the FRB to a region approximately seven light years across -- a feat comparable to an individual on Earth being able to distinguish a person on the Moon.

With that level of precision, the research team was able to train an optical telescope onto the location to learn more about the environment from which the burst emanated. What they found has added a new chapter to the mystery surrounding the origins of FRBs.

"We used the eight-metre Gemini North telescope in Hawaii to take sensitive images that showed the faint spiral arms of a Milky-Way-like galaxy and showed that the FRB source was in a star-forming region in one of those arms," said co-author Shriharsh Tendulkar, a former McGill University postdoctoral researcher who co-led the optical imaging and spectroscopic analyses of the FRB's location.

[...] "The FRB is among the closest yet seen and we even speculated that it could be a more conventional object in the outskirts of our own galaxy," said co-author Mohit Bhardwaj, a McGill University doctoral student and CHIME team member.

"However the EVN observation proved that it's in a relatively nearby galaxy, making it still a puzzling FRB, but close enough to now study using many other telescopes."

A repeating fast radio burst source localized to a nearby spiral galaxy$, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1866-z)


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 07 2020, @04:54PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 07 2020, @04:54PM (#940676) Journal
    I was thinking the same thing. If the galaxy was a nearby spiral galaxy (which tend to be big BTW), then why wasn't it named? Well, half a billion light years isn't nearby.