et al., CC BY) What still isn't knownĪstronomers in this new field still don't know what exactly produces FRBs, so every new discovery or piece of information is important. (Image credit: Niu, CH., Aggarwal, K., Li, D. The bottom half shows the frequency range for each individual burst. The top of this diagram show six spikes in radio wave brightness that are six bursts from FRB190520. But this new FRB shows that estimates using dispersion can sometimes be incorrect and throws many assumptions out the window. For the other 19 FRBs with known locations, the distances estimated from dispersion are very similar to the real distances to their source galaxies. For the rest of the roughly 800 known FRBs, astronomers have to rely on dispersion alone to estimate their distance from Earth. Much to our surprise, the distance estimate we made using the dispersion of the FRB was 30 billion light years from Earth, a distance 10 times larger than the actual 3 billion light years to the galaxy.Īstronomers have only been able to pinpoint the exact location - and therefore distance from Earth - of 19 other FRB sources. Second, since we were able to pinpoint that the FRB came from a dwarf galaxy, we were able to determine exactly how far away that galaxy is from Earth. Of the more than 800 FRBs discovered to date, only one other has a similar persistent radio signal. It was then that we started to realize how truly unique and important this FRB is.įirst, we found that there is a persistent, though much fainter, radio signal being emitted by something from the same place that FRB190520 came from. Our team then used the Very Large Array, a radio telescope in New Mexico, to further study this FRB and successfully pinpointed the location of its source - a dwarf galaxy roughly 3 billion light years from Earth.

An immediately apparent interesting thing about FRB190520 was that it is one of the only 24 repeating FRBs and repeats much more frequently than others - producing 75 bursts over a span of six months in 2020. We found it using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope in China. The new FRB my colleagues and I discovered is named FRB190520.

Cnn radio signal from space