麻豆淫院

An international team of astronomers has observed one of the brightest fast radio bursts (FRBs) ever detected鈥攁nd pinpointed its location in a nearby galaxy (NGC 4141). FRB 20250316A has been nicknamed RBFLOAT, which stands for Radio Brightest FLash Of All Time. The finding and the discovery of the location surprised the team and revealed new insight into FRBs, which are one of astrophysics' biggest mysteries.

FRBs are powerful, millisecond-long flashes of radio waves from space. Researchers suspect that they are the result of extreme cosmic events but have, so far, been unable to determine their exact origin. FRBs are notoriously difficult to study because they vanish in the blink of an eye.

This discovery was made using the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), one of the premier instruments used to study FRBs, along with data from NASA's JWST. One of CHIME's telescopes (also called outriggers) is located in the National Radio Quiet Zone on the campus of the U.S. National Science Foundation Green Bank Observatory.

This outrigger is one of several CHIME telescopes distributed across North America, which also includes locations in British Columbia and California, designed to work together for very long baseline interferometry (VLBI). Fengqiu Adam Dong, a co-author on the posted to the arXiv preprint server, is a Jansky Fellow based at the NSF Green Bank Observatory.

The Green Bank Outrigger, combined with the rest of the array, allowed researchers to triangulate RBFLOAT's position with extremely high spatial resolution, down to tens of milliarcseconds, which corresponds to approximately 13 parsecs (or 45 light-years) at the FRB's distance.