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Cosmology

Home of a fast radio burst

Nature volume 530, pages 427–428 (2016)Cite this article

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Our understanding of fast radio bursts — intense pulses of radio waves — and their use as cosmic probes promises to be transformed now that one burst has been associated with a galaxy of known distance from Earth. See Letter p.453

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are bright pulses of radio waves that last only milliseconds and originate from random locations on the sky. Although the physical processes that cause these pulses are unknown, FRBs hold great promise as probes of the cosmic web, a major constituent of the large-scale structure of the Universe. On page 453 of this issue, Keane et al.1 report the discovery of a fading radio source associated with an FRB (FRB 150418) that was found on 18 April 2015. From observations with various telescopes, they show that FRB 150418 and its fading counterpart come from an elliptical galaxy some 1.9 billion parsecs (6 billion light years) away. Just as happened with γ-ray bursts almost 20 years ago, knowing both the location of origin and the distance of that location from Earth will help to reveal the physical nature of the event that caused the FRB.

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Figure 1: Redshift of a fast radio burst (FRB).

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  1. Duncan Lorimer is in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia 26506, USA.,

    Duncan Lorimer

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  1. Duncan Lorimer
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Correspondence to Duncan Lorimer.

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Lorimer, D. Home of a fast radio burst. Nature 530, 427–428 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/530427a

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