Radio burst is detected from a “dead galaxy,” baffling astronomers

FRBs is a really good field to be in right now. Feels like we’re in for some exciting progress soon enough.

Guess the galaxy wasn’t as dead as we thought just out here ghosting the laws of physics. 👻📡

“baffling” and “baffled” should be banned from this sub. Always misleading clickbait.

One of the decoded messages apparently contains the recipe of the ultimate burger.

Someone in a dead galaxy just happened to see the news. “they elected who?! AGAIN?!”

Astronomer here! Interesting result!

The burst recorded here is a [Fast Radio Burst (FRB)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_radio_burst), which are bursts of radiation that come from beyond our galaxy, last just a millisecond (some repeat over time, some are one-offs), and are so luminous that they’re one of the brightest things in the radio sky for that millisecond. We don’t know what causes them, but there are many theories- one popular one for example suggests they come from very young [magnetars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar)- highly magnetized neutron stars. It’s also possible more than one thing causes FRBs- we don’t know yet!

Now, one way to know what causes an FRB is look at a bunch of their locations, and identity the type of galaxy host. Some types of events are more popular from some types of galaxies than others- supernovas (exploding stars) for example are more common in galaxies with a lot of star formation, because stars that explode live short lives. And enter this repeating FRB- [the paper](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad9ddc) reports that they looked at many bursts from one FRB, and found a precise location in a galaxy 2 billion light years from us, on the outskirts of an [elliptical galaxy.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptical_galaxy) These types of galaxies are *old*, and there’s evidence that this came from a [globular cluster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globular_cluster) to boot- literally a kind of cluster of stars that are the oldest we know of in our universe.

Whoa, ok! What does that tell us? Well there’s always the *chance* of a random stray young object there, or a low level surface galaxy you can’t see, but it’s tough to argue about a young magnetar in that kind of environment. Instead, it indicates the FRB could be created by something far older- an old star merging, or a black hole, etc. We frankly don’t know what is true- all we know is this is *not* strong evidence you’d expect if it’s a young magnetar.

Finally, worth noting we definitely have seen FRBs from unusual galaxies in the past, and there’s no clear pattern yet because we haven’t localized too many of them yet to a specific galaxy (it’s hard for reasons I won’t get into). So time will tell if this is *actually* a clue, or something random. Stay tuned!

Whenever I see a headline about radio astronomy, it’s clear to me that the writers of the article are banking on people not understanding what the hell a radio wave is and that it’s just a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that are very frequently generated by natural sources.