Radio signals transmitted 8 billion years ago, like heartbeats, captured

This "explosive" and extremely scary-origin radio signal could be used to "weigh" the universe.

The mysterious signal, codenamed FRB 20220610A , transmitted from a world 8 billion years ago, is a "radio burst".

Radio bursts are fast, powerful radio signals that can travel through intergalactic space. Many theories surround the origin of these radio signals, including collisions of black holes, neutron stars (the 'zombies' of giant stars), and even aliens.

New radio signal may have been transmitted from a galaxy collision 8 billion years ago - (Photo: Shutterstock).

According to Live Science , this signal is 1.5 times older and farther away than the previous record-holding radio burst.

In the view from a radio telescope, light from the burst event flickers in a rhythmic pattern like a heartbeat.

This time, scientists believe they know its origin: A violent collision between three ancient galaxies.

The fact that this signal came from the past, when the universe was "young", offers scientists a rare opportunity to "weigh" the mass of the universe, and possibly find the answer to where half of its matter went.

"If we calculate the amount of ordinary matter in the universe - the atoms that make up everything including us - then we can see that more than half of what should be there today is missing," said co-author Professor Ryan Shannon from Swinburne University (Australia).

They believe the missing matter is lurking in galaxies, but it may be so hot and diffuse that conventional techniques cannot find it.

Currently, there are two ways to find them . One is to use gravitational lenses - that is, giant foreground objects such as galaxies, galaxy clusters, star clusters. - to see how matter affects the path of light from distant galaxies.

The second way is to look at the universe's first light—the radiation left over from the Big Bang—which could reveal where matter first condensed before the universe began to expand.

However, these two methods have many shortcomings, and are sometimes inconsistent with each other and with many standard theories in cosmology.

Radio signals like FRB 20220610A are a perfect third solution. As the radio bursts travel through space, they separate the matter they pass through into different frequencies of light pulses.

The delay between high and low frequencies in the signal can help astronomers figure out how much matter the radio signal has passed through.