Billion Sun–Bright Events Leave Radio Wave Clues
宇宙光的无线电波

“Fast radio bursts” detected here on Earth last only a thousandth of a second, but are the result of a faraway source briefly shining a billion or more times brighter than our sun.
地球探测到的“快速无线电暴”只有几毫秒，但它们的来源却是非常遥远的光源，却能发出短暂但比太阳亮上十亿倍光的光。

撰文：李·比林斯
翻译：惠丹丹
审核：邰伦玥

Radio waves are invisible to our eyes. But if you could see them, the sky would dance with random tiny flashes. Thousands of what are called “fast radio bursts” are estimated to occur every day. And though each pinprick flash lasts only a thousandth of a second, they represent a faraway source briefly shining a billion or more times brighter than our sun.
人眼无法看到无线电波，但如果可以的话，你将会看到天空到处都有小光点闪烁。科学家估计每天有成千上万的所谓“快速无线电暴”出现。虽然这些针孔大小的闪烁光点只持续几毫秒，但它们的来源其实是遥远的、可以发出短暂但比太阳亮上十亿倍光的光源。

Fast radio bursts have been known for nearly a decade, but scientists have struggled to determine exactly where they come from. And they’d like to know. Because finding their origins would help astronomers use the bursts as probes to map the history and structure of the universe in unprecedented detail.
科学家们发现快速无线电暴近十年了，但他们一直在探索它们到底是来自于哪里。因为，找到发射源天文学家们就可以利用这些无线电暴作为探针来描绘出前所未有的详细的宇宙历史和结构图。

Now researchers have found the source of one particular burst. They used radio telescopes in Australia and the giant Subaru optical telescope in Hawaii to trace a burst observed last April. And they determined it came from an old elliptical galaxy full of exhausted, dying suns some six billion light-years away. The findings are in the journal Nature. [Link to come]
现在，研究人员发现了一个无线电暴的发射源。去年四月，他们用澳大利亚的无线电天文望远镜和夏威夷的巨型斯巴鲁光学望远镜追踪了一个观测到的无线电暴。他们认为它是来自于一个古老的大概六十亿光年远的椭圆银河系，那里充满了快要萎缩的太阳。这一发现发表在自然期刊上。

Identifying the source galaxy provides crucial clues. For one thing, such a galaxy is short on some of the objects expected to cause bursts, such as supernovae or rapidly spinning and flaring pulsars, suggesting this burst came from something else. And, although the burst in question lasted only milliseconds, astronomers were able to witness its faint, fading radio afterglow for about six days. That’s the sort of after glow expected from a colliding pair of ancient neutron stars, which would be a relatively common occurrence among an elliptical galaxy’s geriatric suns.
确定了这个发射源星系可以提供很多关键信息。比如，这个星系缺少可以产生无线电暴的星体，例如超新星或快速旋转闪烁的脉冲星，这也就表明这些电暴来自于其它的星体。而且，虽然我们所探索的无线电暴只持续几毫秒，但在它们发亮之后的六天内，天文学家都可以观察到逐渐消失的微弱的无线波。发光后的这种现象一般是在古老中子星碰撞后才能看到的，这在椭圆星系中濒临毁灭的太阳中是相对平常的现象。

Even though this particular burst has probably been explained, many mysteries remain—not all bursts seem to come from the same cosmic source. Fortunately, most possible burst sources could be distinguished by the gravitational waves they emit, like those recently seen by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO. That means researchers may soon be searching the skies for both radio and gravitational waves for these bursts, to help draw an ever more detailed map of the cosmos.
虽然这个快速无线电暴基本已经有了来源，但还有很多谜团未解——不是所有的电暴都来自同一个发射源。值得庆幸的是，大多数电暴源都可以通过它们发射的引力波来辨别的，就像最近用激光干涉引力波天文台（LIGO）探测到的引力波一样。这也就意味着研究人员可能很快要同时探测无线电波和引力波来搜索宇宙空间，从而描绘空前的详细宇宙地图。