Astronomy scientists

10/20/2023 at 19:11 (Doha time)

Astronomers from the Australian Swinburne University monitored an extremely powerful stream of radio waves coming from a very distant galaxy, which took eight billion light-years to reach Earth, a discovery that would help unravel the mystery of this cosmic phenomenon.

Scientists explained that the fast radio burst is a flash of electromagnetic waves that lasts less than a thousandth of a second and has reached Earth, and the Australian telescope “ESCAP” was able to capture its signal, and it turned out that this flow is coming from a galaxy much farther away than the one that was the source of the radio fluxes. The fastest speed previously recorded, it crossed eight billion light-years, a time when the universe was less than half its current age.

“That the telescope in Western Australia was able to detect these fast radio bursts is amazing,” said Ryan Shannon, an astrophysicist and co-author of the study from the university.

He continued: “We were able to observe this small point in the sky for a period of a thousandth of a second, after the flow had passed eight billion years to be observed, and this new radio flow far exceeded the previous record for a similar flow that took five billion light-years to reach the Earth, and the new flow was of “Extremely powerful, in less than a thousandth of a second, it released an amount of energy equivalent to what the sun emits in 30 years.”

He added that these fast radio bursts recorded by the Australian telescope carry the signature of excess matter, and there is still a need to record a large number of radio waves to improve calculations of the missing matter.

Clarify a puzzle

Scientists explained that these radio flows may contribute to clarifying another mystery, which is the amount of solid matter in the universe, which is believed to represent about 5 percent of the universe, while the rest consists of dark matter and dark energy, but the problem is that more than half of this five is in the universe. One percent of the solid is missing.

Scientists believe it lies in the cosmic web – thin threads of gas that connect galaxies together, but which are so widespread that they are not visible to telescopes, and this gas actually causes changes in the wavelength of fast radio bursts.