An international research team led by Professor Tomonori Totani of the Department of Astronomy, Graduate School of Science, the University of Tokyo, will be the first to follow up on "fast radio bursts (FRBs)" discovered by the Parks Radio Observatory in Australia with a Subaru telescope. We found the galaxy that occurred and revealed that the distance is 50 billion light years and that the FRB is a huge explosion phenomenon.This research was conducted jointly by the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, and the Parks Observatory of Austria, and the research results were published in the British scientific journal "Nature".
Professor Totani and his colleagues set up a Japanese team to follow up on the FRB with the Subaru Telescope, and started a joint observation project with the Parks Observatory in Australia, which detected the FRB. In 2015, when the FRB that occurred near Canis Major was photographed with a telescope in the direction of the radio wave that seems to be the afterglow of the FRB observed by the Austrian group, a galaxy about 50 billion light years away from the earth was photographed. discover. We have determined that it is the source of the Fed.
This result also gave great implications for cosmological issues.Observable substances such as stars and clusters of galaxies in the universe are collectively called "baryons", but it is said that about 10% of all baryons are stars or gas.It was a mystery as to how the rest existed, and it was called the "missing baryon problem".By analyzing the radio waves generated by the burst, we were able to calculate the number of electrons distributed in outer space from 50 billion light-years away to reach the earth.This supports the theory that "most of the baryons exist as an invisible intergalactic medium."
With this achievement, it is expected that research on this mysterious celestial phenomenon will become more active worldwide.It is also expected that research will develop significantly with the aim of applying it to cosmology research.
