"In the time it takes you to drink a cup of coffee, hundreds of FRBs may have gone off somewhere in the Universe," said Avi Loeb, who recently speculated that these signals may be signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. "If we can study even a fraction of those well enough, we should be able to unravel their origin."
"If we are right about such a high rate of FRBs happening at any given time, you can imagine the sky is filled with flashes like paparazzi taking photos of a celebrity," said Anastasia Fialkov of the CfA, who led the study. "Instead of the light we can see with our eyes, these flashes come in radio waves."
When fast radio bursts, or FRBs, were first detected in 2001, astronomers had never seen anything like them before. Since then, astronomers have found a couple of dozen FRBs, but they still don't know what causes these rapid and powerful bursts of radio emission.
For the first time, two astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) have estimated how many FRBs should occur over the entire observable universe. Their work indicates that at least one FRB is going off somewhere every second.