Discovery of most distant and most energetic fast radio burst to date

Using the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have pinned down the source of the most distant and most energetic fast radio burst to date.

The burst, named FRB 20220610A, is so energetic that it released equivalent of our Sun's total emission over 30 years in a tiny fraction of a second. The source galaxy of this blast is so far away that its light took eight billion years to reach us, making it the most distant fast radio burst found to date.

🚨 ESO's #VLT helps astronomers pin down the source of a remote blast of cosmic radio waves lasting less than a millisecond 🌀📌 This is the most distant & most energetic 'fast radio burst' ever detected ⬇️ https://t.co/aAW1TloEJh Illustration: ESO/M. Kornmesser 1/4 pic.twitter.com/k02j8vCfx7

— ESO (@ESO) October 19, 2023

FRB 20220610A was discovered in June 2022 by the ASKAP radio telescope in Australia. Based on this discovery, researchers confirm that fast radio bursts can be used to measure the missing matter between galaxies, providing a new way to weigh the Universe.

"Using ASKAP's array of dishes, we were able to determine precisely where the burst came from. Then we used [ESO's VLT] in Chile to search for the source galaxy, finding it to be older and further away than any other FRB source found to date and likely within a small group of merging galaxies," says Stuart Ryder, an astronomer from Macquarie University in Australia and the co-lead author of the study published today in Science.

The discovery was made possible using data obtained with the FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrograph 2 (FORS2), the X-shooter and the High Acuity Wide-field K-band Imager (HAWK-I) instruments on ESO’s VLT. Data from the Keck Observatory was also used in the study.