For more than a decade, researchers have sought to solve the puzzle of fast radio bursts, millisecond chirps of radio waves that seem to appear at random in the sky, likely from unknown sources millions or even billions of light-years away. Theorists have many ideas for what causes them, including stellar flares, cataclysmic mergers of neutron stars and evaporating black holes. They have so many ideas, in fact, that the theories for FRB sources have long outnumbered the recorded bursts. That paucity of observed bursts reflects the hardest part of the FRB puzzle: Guessing where to point a telescope to catch them as they happen.
Now, however, astronomers know where to look to reliably see at least one: a patch of sky about one-tenth the size of the full Moon in the direction of the constellation Auriga. That’s where researchers using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico detected eleven FRBs over the past four years, all apparently originating from the same mysterious astrophysical source. The findings are reported in the journal Nature (Scientific American is part of Springer Nature).
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