An Ancient Dead Galaxy Is Making Radio Signals

​​Astronomers have detected repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs) from a distant “dead galaxy,” making them question everything they knew about this dormant system and the source of FRBs.

Before this discovery, experts believed that the galaxy did not contain the type of energy to produce such signals. 

According to a paper published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, “Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are micro-to-millisecond-duration bursts of radio emission originating from extragalactic distances. While thousands of FRBs have been detected, their origins remain unknown. Most FRB progenitor models involve stellar populations such as neutron stars and magnetars.”

Astronomers Have Discovered Fast Radio Bursts Coming From a ‘Dead Galaxy’

However, the researchers said that the dormant galaxy should not contain the type of young star responsible for these radio bursts.

“This discovery was really surprising and exciting,” Vishwangi Shah, a PhD student in the Department of Physics and the Trottier Space Institute at McGill University and one of the study authors, told ABC News.

Using the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME telescope), Shah and her team of researchers were able to detect the signals but needed another device to figure out where, exactly, they were coming from. 

They then used both a smaller, CHIME-like telescope and a Gemini North telescope to both determine the source and rule out other galaxies near the FRBs. 

“There’s no other galaxy there,” Shah told ABC News. “This particular FRB is really an outlier, and it challenges our theories about what is producing FRBs.”

You might be wondering: why does this even matter? According to Shah, studying these FRBs will help astronomers better understand the space between the signals and the Milky Way, as well as what is occurring in such regions.

“It is a really useful probe of our universe,” she said.