On the Trail of Fast Radio Bursts

[Recusant]

That fellow with the excited hair from the silly television show (and no doubt Ihateyoumike as well, were he here) would tell you that fast radio bursts are made by aliens. Seems rather unlikely, but nonetheless they're something worthy of investigation. The observations described in the story below don't nail down the source, so I suppose there's still an extremely remote chance that it's aliens.

"Astronomers Just Narrowed Down The Source of Those Powerful Radio Signals From Space" | ScienceAlert

Strange, powerful signals from deep space called fast radio bursts are slippery little suckers.

Most of them just flash once, a mysterious huge spike in the radio data out of nowhere, lasting just milliseconds at most. They can't be predicted, and because they're so brief, they're incredibly hard to trace.

Hard; but not impossible. Less than a year ago, for the first time, astronomers announced they traced one of these mysterious one-off signals to its source galaxy. Since then, their techniques have allowed them to trace three more.

And this has now given us one of the keys that help us unlock the mystery of what fast radio bursts are - a census of the galaxies that spat them out across the Universe.

"Just like doing video calls with colleagues shows you their homes and gives you a bit of an insight into their lives, looking into the host galaxies of fast radio bursts gives us insights to their origins," explained astrophysicist Shivani Bhandari of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia.

Ever since the fast radio bursts were discovered in 2007, astronomers have been itching to find out what causes them. They're just so cool and weird - a flash of radio waves that lasts the blink of an eye, with the power of hundreds of millions of Suns.

[Continues . . .]

[Dark Lightning]

Interesting! I just went down the rabbit hole over there for about half an hour! #notaliens

[Randy]

That is amazing! Thanks for the find.

[Tank]

As always, very interesting.

[Sandra Craft]

I wish that, just once, it actually was aliens.

[Randy]

That would be cool, Sandy. I wonder if their TV signals have better content than ours.