Hubble Telescope finds surprising source of brightest fast radio burst ever

[Admin]

The brightest fast radio burst ever observed flashed from a group of ancient galaxies, the Hubble Space Telescope has found, and astronomers are surprised.

Hubble Telescope finds surprising source of brightest fast radio burst ever : Read more

 

[AboveAndBeyond]

> These brief explosions of cosmic radio waves last only a fraction of a second
> but can briefly outshine the radio output of an entire galaxy.

That's incredible!!

And wrong. No one knows how to measure the distance to an FRB, and the absolute luminosity hinges critically on the distance. (The inverse square law and all that.) For all we know they could be only tens or dozens of parsecs away, not gazillions of light years away.

The problem with modern telescopes is that if you look faint enough in any direction you're bound to hit a galaxy at some great distance in the background. The positional coincidence on the sky doesn't mean the FRB is in the distant galaxy.

More skepticism on the part of people reporting this junk science is called for, because astronomy these days is completely guided by orthodoxy and group-think.