Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one of the few truly mysterious phenomena in the universe. Astronomers first noticed the milliseconds-long intense pulses of radio waves in 2006, and we’ve slowly but steadily been learning moreabout the extragalactic signals ever since.
We still don’t really know exactly what they are, but thanks to a study published Wednesday in Nature (in fact it’s the cover story), we’re finally starting to understand these strange signals.
Do the Twist
Now, a caveat: This finding only concerns one type of FRB, and really just one specific example. The source, known as FRB121102, is the only known repeating FRB, and just last year astronomers pinpointed its location to a dwarf galaxy about 3 billion light-years away. This distance actually underscores how powerful the bursts have to be, since they have to cover such a huge distance to get to us — just a single millisecond of energy in one of these bursts is equivalent to all the energy the sun releases in a day.
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