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the powerful radio pulses emanate from sources 5 billion to nearly 11 billion light years away

these sources remains a mystery

but “clearly they’re very energetic events, probably cataclysmic.”

One-time radio pulses have been hard to detect

today’s telescopes capture radio waves from such a small fraction of the sky

the instruments lack the ultrafast time resolution required to pinpoint the short-lived bursts

The four new blips may add weight to the only other extragalactic radio burst ever witnessed, reported seven years

only had one burst

wondered whether it was

artifact

occurred 13.8 billion years ago

These newfound objects allowed the researchers to calculate that an FRB should occur once every 10 seconds

whether the new signals came from inside or outside the Milky Way.

they studied how the radio waves were affected by the material they pass through — a technique that could allow these new objects to shed light on the components of space.

As radio waves travel in space, they are stretched and slowed by the ionized material through which they move

Using models, the team concluded that the FRBs traveled billions of light-years — much farther than the edge of Earth's galaxy

the source is likely located in another galaxy

They are so bright and narrow that we can limit the size of the emission region at the source to just a few hundred kilometers

Although the explosions are brief, the astronomers can pinpoint the bursts' locations pretty accurately

No corresponding object could be observed in optical, gamma or X-ray wavelengths, so the explosions' origins remain unknown to scientists

Possible sources

intersecting magnetic fields from two neutron stars, extremely dense city-size bodies packing the mass of the sun.

A special kind of supernova orbited by a neutron star could potentially produce radio bursts as the star's magnetic field interacts with the explosion of the supernova

such combinations would be rare

favorite explanation is a giant burst from a magnetar, a highly magnetized type of neutron star

performed approximately a year after the FRBs were first spotted, looked at whether the objects continued to produce emission, but the signals appear to be nonrepeating

Efforts are ongoing at the moment to detect FRBs in close to real time, such that they can be followed up quickly