About 5 billion light years from Earth, something – we don’t know what yet – released a burst of energy equivalent to what our Sun puts out across 80 years.That signal shot through the universe, eventually reaching Earth to be detected by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder in Western Australia’s Murchison in November last year.
You may have somehow missed the parties in the street but the Federal Budget is now effectively balanced for 2018-19 and about to enter healthy surplus territory for the current year.
Part of the reason for that lack of celebration is that the excitement is somewhat tempered by the fairly dubious economic circumstances that confront Australia.
Growth is slowing, unemployment is starting to kick up and the dreaded R word – recession – is being dusted off after 28 years.But it didn’t just travel across a vast expanse of empty space.
Along the way, the energy from what’s known as a fast radio burst passed through several deep-space phenomena, including a ‘halo’ of gas surrounding a galaxy about four billion light years from Earth.
Now, an international research team including astronomers from WA’s Curtin University are using information gleaned from the signal’s journey through that intergalactic gas to broaden our understanding of the forces shaping those giant pinwheels of stars.
And the study has yielded a few surprises.
Astrophysicist Associate Professor Jean-Pierre Macquart, from Curtin’s node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, said the team initially thought the FRB signal would be distorted by the gas as it travelled through, similar to air shimmering on a hot summer’s day.
Instead, the research, published today in the journal Science, showed the pulse of energy appeared to travel through a “calm sea of unperturbed gas”.
