A star’s mass determines its entire life story, from how it shines to how it dies. For young stars shrouded in dust, getting an accurate mass has long been difficult…but new radio measurements are beginning to change that.
Recent News
3I/ATLAS Contains 30X More Semi-Heavy Water Than Comets In Our Solar System
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) discovered that the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is made of an astonishingly high ratio of semi-heavy water relative to water, indicating that its system of origin likely formed under conditions far colder than our own.
Women and Girls in Astronomy Program Now Accepting Applications
The Women and Girls in Astronomy Program (WGAP), led by Associated Universities Inc. (AUI), under the North American Regional Office of Astronomy for Development (NA-ROAD) has been awarded a three-year grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to expand its impact.
Brightest Ever Fast Radio Burst Allows Researchers To Identify Its Origin
Artist’s rendition of CHIME/FRB and its Outriggers localizing FRB 20250316A (RBFLOAT.) Inset: The host galaxy (NGC 4141) as imaged by the MMT Observatory (PI: Yuxin (Vic) Dong), illustrates the location of the FRB within a spiral arm of NGC 4141. Credit: Daniëlle Futselaar/MMT Observatory
Astronomers use newly deployed telescopes and deep-space imaging to challenge long-held assumptions about what causes these mysterious cosmic signals
An international team of astronomers have observed one of the brightest fast radio bursts (FRBs) ever detected—and 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). A co-author on the paper, Fengqiu Adam Dong, 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.
This news was adapted from press releases from several institutions involved with this research, including McGill University and the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.
This news article was originally published on the NRAO website on August 21, 2025.
Recent News
Unraveling the Mass Mystery of Orion’s Young Stars
A star’s mass determines its entire life story, from how it shines to how it dies. For young stars shrouded in dust, getting an accurate mass has long been difficult…but new radio measurements are beginning to change that.
3I/ATLAS Contains 30X More Semi-Heavy Water Than Comets In Our Solar System
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) discovered that the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is made of an astonishingly high ratio of semi-heavy water relative to water, indicating that its system of origin likely formed under conditions far colder than our own.
Women and Girls in Astronomy Program Now Accepting Applications
The Women and Girls in Astronomy Program (WGAP), led by Associated Universities Inc. (AUI), under the North American Regional Office of Astronomy for Development (NA-ROAD) has been awarded a three-year grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to expand its impact.