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Flashing fast radio bursts...Animation of the randomness of fast radio bursts. (NRAO Outreach/Vimeo) Like gravitational waves (GWs) and gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one of the most powerful and mysterious astronomical phenomena today. These transient events consist of bursts that put out more energy in a millisecond than the Sun does in three days. While most bursts last mere milliseconds, there have been rare cases where FRBs were found repeating. While astronomers are still unsure what causes them and opinions vary, dedicated observatories and international collaborations have dramatically increased the number of events available for study. A...

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are intense bursts of radio emission lasting milliseconds and showcasing characteristic dispersion sweep of radio pulsars. The physical nature of these bursts is yet unknown, and astronomers consider a variety of explanations ranging from synchrotron maser emission from young magnetars in supernova remnants to cosmic string cusps. FRB 121102 is the first repeating fast radio burst detected and one of the most extensively studied FRB sources. It exhibits complex burst morphology, sub-burst downward frequency drifts, and also complex pulse phenomenology. FRB 121102 is also one of only two FRBs reported to be spatially associated with persistent...

The so-called Fast Radio Burst repeats every 157 days with the power of millions of suns and its latest barrage arrived right on time last week. Known as FRB 121102, scientists hope that studying the strange blinkering signal could unlock the secret to what FRBs are and where they come from. Fast Radio Bursts are intense pulses of radio waves that last no longer than the blink of an eye and come from far beyond our Milky Way galaxy. Their origins are unknown. . The group’s findings, to The Astronomer’s Telegram, suggest the burst is currently in its active phase...

Most FRBs originate hundreds of millions of light-years away. This one came from inside the Milky Way. Thirty thousand years ago, a dead star on the other side of the Milky Way belched out a powerful mixture of radio and X-ray energy. On April 28, 2020, that belch swept over Earth, triggering alarms at observatories around the world. The signal was there and gone in half a second, but that's all scientists needed to confirm they had detected something remarkable: the first ever "fast radio burst" (FRB) to emanate from a known star within the Milky Way, according to a...

A source of repeating radio waves seen from one point in the sky presents astronomers with numerous mysteries. The source of this signal, where radiation builds and ebbs over a period of 16 days, remains a question. The longevity of these cycles — now seen continuing for over 500 days — could either present another mystery, or perhaps a clue to what is going on at the center of these displays. Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one form of highly-energetic explosion in deep space. Thought to be caused by small, massive objects, although the exact nature of these objects is...

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are extragalactic flashes of light that pack a serious wallop, unleashing in a few milliseconds as much energy as Earth's sun does in a century. More than 100 FRBs have been discovered to date, and most of them are one-offs, flaring up just a single time (as far as we know). In January of this year, astronomers reported that one member of the "repeater" class, called FRB 180916.J0158+65, appears to exhibit a 16-day activity cycle: It fires off bursts for a four-day stretch, goes quiet for 12 days and then starts all over again. FRB...

Astronomers have discovered an activity cycle in another fast radio burst, potentially unearthing a significant clue about these mysterious deep-space phenomena. An artist's impression of a fast radio burst (FRB) reaching Earth, with colors signifying different wavelengths. Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are extragalactic flashes of light that pack a serious wallop, unleashing in a few milliseconds as much energy as Earth's sun does in a century. Scientists first spotted an FRB in 2007, and the cause of these eruptions remains elusive nearly a decade and a half later; potential explanations range from merging superdense neutron stars to advanced alien...

Work on this event is very preliminary, with astronomers madly scrambling to analyse the swathes of data. But many seem in agreement that it could finally point to the source of fast radio bursts (FRBs). "This sort of, in most people's minds, settles the origin of FRBs as coming from magnetars," astronomer Shrinivas Kulkarni of Caltech, and member of one of the teams, the STARE2 survey that also detected the radio signal, told ScienceAlert. Fast radio bursts are one of the most fascinating mysteries in the cosmos. They are extremely powerful radio signals from deep space, galaxies millions of light-years...

Astronomers have never before seen fast radio bursts being emitted in such a regular pattern, and still don't know their origin. Astronomers have detected alien signals - that is, signals from a foreign galaxy - being emitted in an unusually regular 16-day cycle. Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are not in and of themselves unusual - the first was detected in 2007 - but previous observations have shown them to be mostly emitted at random. While there have been some bursts which repeated, as astronomers discovered previously, they have never been seen repeating in such a steady cycle. The origin of...

A mysterious repeating radio signal from space revealed last year is now the fifth fast radio burst to be tracked back to its source galaxy. It's a location unlike any of the others, and astronomers are having to rethink their previous assumptions about how these signals are generated. The origin of this repeating signal is a spiral galaxy, located 500 million light-years from Earth, making it the closest known source of what we call fast radio bursts (FRBs) yet. And the FRBs are emanating specifically from a region just seven light-years across - a region that's alive with star formation....

‘Cytotron’, a medical invention by Bengaluru based scientist Rajah Vijay Kumar to help in cancer treatment has got the honour of being called a ‘breakthrough device’ in cancer care by the USA’s Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Centre for Device and Radiological Health ‘Cytotron’ aids in tissue engineering of cancer cells, altering how specific proteins are regulated to stop these cells from multiplying and spreading, reported Times of India. “It is a great feeling that after so many years of hard work against all odds, an institution like the USFDA is designating our work as a breakthrough in the treatment...

As recently as two years ago, SETI began picking up a different kind of signal — one that scientists can’t explain but believe that it isn’t born out of an attempt to communicate: fast radio bursts (FRBs). These FRBs are massively powerful; so powerful, in fact, that the leading natural explanation scientists can come up with is that they’re from “highly magnetized neutron stars, blasted by gas streams near to a supermassive black hole.” The problem with that explanation is that the bursts aren’t all coming from one specific place, but they are all coming from one specific region of...

A new radio telescope in Canada is doing its job picking up mysterious signals from deep space known as "fast radio bursts" (FRBs). The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) in British Columbia detected the first-ever FRB at frequencies below 700 MHz on July 25, a signal named FRB 180725A. As you might guess, FRBs are milliseconds-long bursts of radio emissions that come from some unknown source across the universe. They're one of the newer cosmic mysteries around, having been first detected only about a decade ago. Possible explanations include bursts from magnetars, exploding black holes, and yes, highly advanced...

New work probes the extraterrestrial source of incredibly powerful explosions of radio waves, investigating why that spot is the only known location to repeatedly burst with these blasts.  These repeating bursts may come from a dense stellar core called a neutron star near an extraordinarily powerful magnetic field, such as one near a massive black hole, the study finds. Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are intense pulses of radio waves lasting just milliseconds that can give off more energy in a fraction of a second than the sun does in hours, days or weeks. FRBs were discovered only in 2007,...

A $100 million search for intelligent aliens has spied 15 bizarre, repeating flashes of light coming from a distant galaxy. The galaxy — a dwarf known as FRB 121102 that lies 3 billion light-years from Earth — is a known source of such brief, high-energy fast radio bursts (FRBs). But the newly detected pulses stand out, astronomers said. "Bursts from this source have never been seen at this high a frequency," Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. Some researchers think FRBs — which...

As Snyder-Beattie explained in the article, the “Great Filter” is a response to the question of why we can’t see any alien civilizations. The “Great Filter” deals with similar issues as the Drake Equation, which talks about the probability of communicating civilizations outside of Earth, and the Fermi Paradox, which asks where the civilizations are. Simply speaking, the idea is that if a civilization continues to expand (especially at the technological pace we humans have experienced), it wouldn’t take all that long in the lifespan of the universe for artificial processes to be visible with our own telescopes. Yes, this...

~snip~ In 1967 British astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell was left stunned by mysterious pulsing signals she detected coming from outside the solar system. For months she suggested the signals could be of an extraterrestrial intelligent origin, but they were later proven to be rapidly spinning stars known as pulsars. However, a new series of mysterious signals, known as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), has again got astronomers scratching their heads and wondering if, maybe, we’re picking up alien messages...