A telescope from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has detected cosmic radio waves at the furthest distance ever from Earth. This distance was half the previous record.
The telescope recorded one of these fast radio bursts in a place where light takes eight billion years to reach Earth. The radio burst was actually recorded in June 2022, but the discovery was only announced on Thursday in the scientific journal Sciences. Cosmic radio waves are a form of electromagnetic radiation.
It turns out that the distance from Earth to the cosmic radio wave is half greater than the previous distance record. The flash lasted less than a millisecond.
Furthermore, it was one of the most powerful flashes ever recorded. “In a fraction of a second, as much energy as our Sun releases in thirty years was released,” says the international ESO team. The cause of the radio explosions is not yet known.
Thanks to radio waves, researchers now have a new way to weigh the universe. It also allows scientists to “better understand the structure of the universe,” says Ryan Shannon, a professor at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.
The burst of cosmic radio waves was recorded by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). The VTL consists of four separate telescopes. It is located in the Atacama Desert in Chile, at an altitude of 2635 meters above sea level.
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