By Brynn MacDougall
Op-Ed Editor

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) were first detected by astronomers in 2001. West Virginia University astronomer Duncan Lorimer analyzed data from the Parkes radio telescope which had been collecting data from the Small Magellanic Cloud. Lorimer focused on data gathered from objects about one billion light years away.

Working together with undergraduate David Narkevic, the two discovered a surprisingly strong radio wave lasting “five thousandths of a second” according to Joe Palca of NPR in his 2007 article “Strong Extragalactic Radio Burst Poses a Mystery”.

“It’s very interesting, we’ve never seen anything like this before,” Lorimer told Palca. “So, we got very excited when we saw that…It is so bright, it jumps off the page.”

Lorimer and Narkevic began going through archived data from other surveys in hopes of finding more FRBs.

“This could be just a version of something we’ve already thought of. Or it could be something completely new that no one has any idea of what it could be, yet,” Louisiana State University astronomer Brad Schaeffer said in an interview with Palca. “It could be due to a black hole-neutron star collision. Or perhaps a neutron star-neutron star collision. Or perhaps even a black hole-black hole collision, far off in a distant galaxy. Well, a billion light years away.”

“Fast radio bursts…emit as much energy in one millisecond as the sun emits in 10,000 years…astronomers estimate that they might occur 10,000 times a day across the entire sky,” Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) wrote for Astronomy Magazine in the article “Scientists pinpoint distance to fast radio burst”.

Since Lorimer found FRBs in 2001, 15 more have been found in archived data. Evan Keane, a project scientist at the Square Kilometer Array Organization (SKAO), caught a FRB in real time on Apr. 18, 2015, marking the discovery of the 17 FRB. It was then dubbed FRB 150418.

Keane’s team immediately activated a network of telescopes they had set up around the globe to pinpoint the FRBs location.

The Australia Telescope Compact Array, located at the Paul Wild Observatory, caught the“afterglow” of FRB 150418 according to Palca.

Soon after, the Japanese telescope Subaru in Hawaii began its search for FRB 150418. The search yielded the discovery of an elliptical galaxy six billion light years away. However, this does not explain the FRB.

“But knowing how far away that object is lets you do some extremely interesting calculations. That’s because the different frequencies that make up the radio burst don’t all arrive at the exact same time,” Palca wrote in his article “In A Far-Off Galaxy, A Clue To What’s Causing Strange Bursts Of Radio Waves”.

Keane elaborated, stating that “the reason for that delay is the stuff that the signal has gone through — the particles and dust in the intervening space.”

The SKAO is now currently developing an immense radio telescope to locate more FRBsand find out what exactly is causing them.

“In the near future, using CSIRO’s Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) should be ideal and ASKAP will be able to start looking for FRBs this year,” he said. “We expect to find several a week, and really clean up,” Simon Johnston, Head of Astrophysics at CSIRO said in the same Astronomy Magazine article.

“I really hope its aliens trying to communicate with us,” Neshaminy graduate Austin Bucci said.