waves come from a distant galaxy captured – BFMTV.COM

This is a cosmic phenomenon still very mysterious. For the first time, astronomers were able to identify the source of a “fast radio burst.” This very brief flash of radio waves spotted by telescopes came from a galaxy 6 billion light years from Earth, reveals a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature .

“quick bursts radio”, or FRB for Fast radio burst, were highlighted in 2007. They emit as much energy in a millisecond that the Sun 10,000 years and it is extremely difficult to detect directly. The Parkes radio telescope in Australia, has nevertheless managed April 18, 2015, bringing to 17 the number of FRB identified to date.

Aliens signals?

The cause of the radio flashes is not known. They could result from the merger of neutron stars, tiny but very dense stars, mainly composed of neutrons, says Evan Keane, senior author of the study. Other scientists even imagine extraterrestrial signals. And him? “No, sorry,” answered Evan Keane, one of the architects of the International SKA radio telescopes network project.

When the Parkes radio telescope, which measures 64 meters in diameter, detect the FRB 150418, an international warning is given so that other telescopes mobilize immediately. Soon after, the last light of the FRB are marked. They were followed for six days. A telescope on Hawaii Island then establishes that the FRB comes from an elliptical galaxy 6 billion light-years. A light year corresponds to 9.461 billion kilometers. This galaxy is wide about 70,000 light years and its mass is equivalent to 100 billion stars the size of the Sun, says Evan Keane.

“This discovery opens the way to understanding what causes these flashes,” said Simon Johnston CSIRO, the Australian research organization that participated in the study.

A track to find the “missing matter”

He hopes that in the future, “it will be possible to find several FRB week.” Experts also say their research provides the answer to the question of the “missing matter” in the universe that intrigues scientists. Currently, it is accepted that the universe is 70% dark energy, 25% of invisible dark matter and 5% ordinary matter: stars, planets, hydrogen. The problem is that only half of that ordinary matter is visible. The rest is “missing”.

The researchers used the FRB “to make cosmological measurements,” says Evan Keane. Indeed, the time it takes the signal to reach FRB allows to know how many particles it has encountered.

“The space is not completely empty but its density is very low. We thought that there was the matter, but we had not been able to see before.”

“as we have observed that it was delaying the signal FRB”, one can imagine that “we have found the missing matter” in the space between the galaxy and us, says Evan Keane.