Fast radio bursts, imagined here in a staggered arrival of frequencies at a detector of the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder telescope.
By Daniel CleryRoughly half of the “normal” matter in the universe—the stuff that makes up stars, planets, and even us—exists as mere wisps of material floating in intergalactic space, according to cosmologists.
But astronomers had no good way to confirm that, until now. A new study has used fast radio bursts (FRBs)—powerful milliseconds-long pulses of radio waves coming from distant galaxies—to weigh intergalactic matter, and the results match up with predictions.“Using FRBs as a probe has been an exciting prospect for a while,” says astronomer Paul Scholz of the University of Toronto who was