Astronomers have found what will be the brightest flash of radio waves ever seen and have tracked this quick radio burst (FRB) again to its supply. This feat might revolutionize theories surrounding these mysterious and speedy blasts of radiation that, in mere milliseconds, can emit as a lot power because the solar does in its whole lifetime.
First noticed in 2007, FRBs have been troublesome for astronomers to elucidate. This is as a result of they final such a quick period of time and solely a small pattern of them repeat, making follow-up investigations troublesome. Though many explanations have been posited for FRBs, the main culprits are excessive useless stars or “neutron stars” with magnetic fields so highly effective they warrant a categorization of their very own and are thus dubbed “magnetars.”
The new FRB has been formally designated FRB 20250316A and has been given the nickname “RBFLOAT,” which stands for “Radio Brightest FLash Of All Time.” This unusually vibrant FRB was first noticed in March 2025 by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), which has been dubbed an “FRB discovery machine” thanks to its immense impact in spotting new FRBs.
This is the first time the CHIME/FRB radio telescope has been used on its own to track an FRB back to its source. In this case, that source is a region just 45 light-years across – smaller than the average star cluster – in the spiral arm at the edge of NGC 4141, a galaxy about 130 million light-years away. To put that feat into context, the team behind the research compares it to spotting a quarter from a distance of 62 miles away.
“This result marks a turning point: instead of just detecting these mysterious flashes, we can now see exactly where they’re coming from. It opens the door to discovering whether they’re caused by dying stars, exotic magnetic objects, or something we haven’t thought of yet,” team leader and McGill University researcher Amanda Cook said in a statement.
CHIME now has the spatial decision to trace again an FRB on this manner, due to its newly constructed “outrigger” telescopes positioned all through North America from British Columbia to California.
“With the CHIME Outriggers, we are finally catching these fleeting cosmic signals in the act — narrowing down their locations not only to individual galaxies, but even to specific stellar environments,” Cook stated. “The precision of this localization, tens of milliarcseconds, is like spotting a quarter from 100 kilometres (62 miles) away. That level of detail is what let us identify the host galaxy, NGC 4141, and match the burst with a faint infrared signal captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).”
This was the primary time that astronomers had been in a position to hint an FRB again to its supply quickly sufficient to observe up with the highly effective infrared imaginative and prescient of the JWST.
“We were rewarded with an exciting result – we see a faint source of infrared light very close to where the radio burst occurred,” workforce member Peter Blanchard, analysis affiliate within the Harvard College Observatory on the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), said in a statement. “This could be the first object linked to an FRB that anyone has found in another galaxy.”
The infrared object positioned by the RBFLOAT supply has been dubbed NIR-1, and it’s believed to be a crimson large star or a middle-aged huge star. Red giants characterize one of many ultimate levels of stars with plenty much like that of the solar, after they’ve exhausted the hydrogen gasoline of their cores and that core collapses because the star’s outer shell “puffs out” to as a lot as 100 instances its authentic diameter.
But no matter NIR-1 is, it’s unlikely to be the reason for RBFLOAT. Red giants and large stars aren’t typically related to phenomena that might set off such an outburst.
What Blanchard and colleagues theorize is that NIR-1 has a extra excessive companion within the type of a neutron star, a useless stellar core that types when stars round 10 instances extra huge than the solar die. The immense gravity of this neutron star might be stripping materials away from NIR-1, with this course of being integral to the launch of this vibrant FRB.
“Whether or not the association with the star is real, we’ve learned a lot about the burst’s origin,” stated Blanchard. “If a double star system isn’t the answer, our work hints that an isolated magnetar caused the FRB.”
If the infrared supply begins to fade over time, it might point out that it’s truly mirrored mild attributable to flaring of no matter object launched RBFLOAT, probably a magnetar.
The brightness of RBFLOAT and its relative proximity to Earth (many FRBs have been traced to sources billions of light-years away), mixed with the truth that the JWST was in a position to seize detailed photos of the area from which it originated, signifies that it might show integral to investigating these puzzling blasts of radiation.
“We have taken the first step on a new path to solving the mystery of FRBs using the sharp imaging of JWST to zoom in on the precise locations from which FRBs are emanating,” Berger concluded. “We can’t predict when and where the next FRB will come from, so we have to be ready to quickly deploy JWST when the time comes.”
Two papers relating to the discovery of RBFLOAT have been revealed in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.