Scientists identified the origin of extremely powerful spaceship radio waves

The country is I am constantly receiving space signals that contain vital information on extremely energy phenomena. Among the most ordinary, short impulses are extremely highly energy radio waves, known as Fast Radio Rafali (FRB). The astronomers compare them with a powerful lighthouses shining milliseconds in the middle of a rough, farther sea. The detection of one of these signals is in itself a achievement, but the identification of its origin and understanding of its source remains one of the great challenges of science.

That is why the recent research conducted by the northwestern university in the United States caught the attention of the astronomical community. The team not only discovered one of the brightest FRBs ever recorded, but also followed its origin with precision unseen.

The pulse, identified as Rbfloat, arrived in March 2025. year, only a few milliseconds lasted and released so much energy while the sun produces in four days. Thanks to the new method of analysis, researchers located their origins in the hand of a spiral galaxy located 130 million light years, in the direction of the constellation of Ursa Major. Research has been published in Astrophysical questions of the magazine.

The Bell radio telescope in Canada, one of Leading world observatoriesAnd the subnet of smaller cells called Outriggers have discovered an anomaly outburst. Chime characterized the signal, while Outriggers trigulated it on a narrow space of space. Optical and X-ray telescopes then provided complementary data. The team achieved precision 13 parsec, equivalent to 42 light years, within the Galaxy NGC 4141.

The astronomers previously specified the second FRB, but signals appeared in these cases, which was facilitated by the analysis. “Rbfloat is the first source of riots on a liciped on such precision,” Sunil Simha said, co-author of the Study, in a university statement. “These are much harder to locate. Therefore, even the discovery of RBFLOAT is proof of the concept that Chime is really capable of discovering such events and build a statistically interesting sample of FRB.”

What caused Rbfloat?

Scientists are still not sure what causes RBFs, but they have some ideas. Due to the huge energy that lets and brevity of phenomena are likely to originate from extreme cosmic events, such as neutron old merging, magnetsaras or pulsars.

In the case of RBFLOAT, the data indicate that it is in the region of forming stars with really massive stars. Triangulation places a signal in the galactic hand where new stars are also born. This suggests that it could be a magnetary, a subclass of neutron stars with a magnetic field billion times stronger than the earth.

Experience with RBFLOAT will allow the team to apply the same triangulation technique to future signals. The authors estimate that they could achieve about 200 accurate RBF detection per year with only Chime signals.

“For years, FRBs appear in the sky, but they are knocked in color slowly. We can now routinely link them to certain galaxies, even to the fourth in these galaxies,” Yukin Dong said, another team member.

This story originally appeared Wired in Spanish and has been translated from Spanish.