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A team of astronomers says they have detected a never-before-heard radio signal that offers insights into the mystery of uncharted deep space. This signal is known as a Fast Radio Burst (FRB), a bright flash of radio light lasting for a few milliseconds and originating from beyond the Milky Way. Some FRBs repeat themselves, and a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society has shed new light. The study has detected a highly active repeating FRB signal behaving differently than anything previously detected. "This work is exciting because it provides both confirmation of known FRB...

Like Gravitational Waves (GWs) and Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs), Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are one of the most powerful and mysterious astronomical phenomena today. These transient events consist of bursts that put out more energy in a millisecond than the Sun does in three days. While most bursts last mere milliseconds, there have been rare cases where FRBs were found repeating. While astronomers are still unsure what causes them and opinions vary, dedicated observatories and international collaborations have dramatically increased the number of events available for study...Despite their mysterious nature, FRBs are ubiquitous and the best estimates indicate that events arrive...

Most FRBs originate hundreds of millions of light-years away. This one came from inside the Milky Way. Thirty thousand years ago, a dead star on the other side of the Milky Way belched out a powerful mixture of radio and X-ray energy. On April 28, 2020, that belch swept over Earth, triggering alarms at observatories around the world. The signal was there and gone in half a second, but that's all scientists needed to confirm they had detected something remarkable: the first ever "fast radio burst" (FRB) to emanate from a known star within the Milky Way, according to a...

New work probes the extraterrestrial source of incredibly powerful explosions of radio waves, investigating why that spot is the only known location to repeatedly burst with these blasts.  These repeating bursts may come from a dense stellar core called a neutron star near an extraordinarily powerful magnetic field, such as one near a massive black hole, the study finds. Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are intense pulses of radio waves lasting just milliseconds that can give off more energy in a fraction of a second than the sun does in hours, days or weeks. FRBs were discovered only in 2007,...