The mysterious FRB 121102 radio burst has just woken back up, right on schedule, beaming radio waves out into space. FRBs, or fast radio bursts, are some of the most pervasive things in astronomy, with researchers struggling to come up with an exact cause for these mysterious signals. FRB 121102 is a radio burst that repeats roughly every 157 days and is said to be coming from a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years away.
Astronomers have come across many Fast Radio Bursts over the past decade, but not every FRB is made equally. Appearing for only a fraction of a millisecond, most of these deep space signals are random, making them very difficult to study. FRB 121102 could help researchers close in on the cause of these mysterious signals, but there is still so much we don't know, and from the looks of it, space is much more "chatty" than we might have thought.
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