Astronomers for the first time have detected repeating short bursts of radio waves from an enigmatic source that is likely located well beyond the edge of our Milky Way galaxy. The findings indicate that these "fast radio bursts" come from an extremely powerful object which occasionally produces multiple bursts in under a minute.
Prior to this discovery, reported in Nature, all previously detected fast radio bursts (FRBs) have appeared to be one-off events. Because of that, most theories about the origin of these mysterious pulses have involved cataclysmic incidents that destroy their source -- a star exploding in a supernova, for example, or a neutron star collapsing into a black hole. The new finding, however, shows that at least some FRBs have other origins.
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