For the first time ever, Australian astronomers have seen bright flashes of radio waves live. These flashes are also known as cosmic radio bursts and they last for only milliseconds.
Researchers have studied these bursts and have actively looked for more since the first burst in 2007, which was discovered by the CSIRO’s Parkes Telescope. Several other bursts have been studied over the years; however, this is the first time one has been discovered happening in real time.
“It was really exciting; it was something we had been waiting for a while. We set up a real time system in March last year, and we had been hoping for a while that we would find one. So, to have one pop up while we were observing was just really exciting,” Emily Petroff, Ph.D. student at the Swinburne University of Technology, said.
Even though the radio bursts were just seen here on earth, they actually took place a long time ago in space.
“The universe is 13 billion years old and we are looking at it from present day. But the further and further away from us we look, we are looking at light that was emitted longer and longer ago. So when we’re seeing these fast radio bursts, we think that they’re coming from very far away, so billions of light years away. The light we’re seeing from them is from a time when the universe was much younger,” Petroff explains.
Researchers are not yet certain what causes these radio bursts, but they have numerous theories. One popular theory is that neutron stars that collapse to form black holes are the reason for these bursts.
