A radio signal coming from a galaxy billions of light-years away has been discovered by scientists. What is producing the signal—a fast radio burst, or FRB—is unknown.

FRBs are radio signals that last just a few milliseconds. What causes them is not known, because it has been impossible to work out where they came from. They were first identified decades ago, but they are normally found in data long after the event has happened.

Pinpointing the source of an FRB is a bit like seeing a bright camera flash in a very dark room—and then trying to find the camera in the dark. On top of that, the room is potentially billions of light-years in size.

Scientists have identified dozens of FRBs and most appear to be one-off events. This led them to speculate that they could be produced some cataclysmic event, such as a neutron star collapsing into a black hole.

However, the mystery deepened in 2016 when researchers discovered an FRB that appeared to be repeating. This discovery—known as FRB 121102—meant that, at least in this case, a one-off event could not explain it. Since then, researchers have been able to trace back these radio signals to the star-forming region of a dwarf galaxy three billion light-years away, and are now working to determine the cause. One of the most popular theories is that the bursts are coming from a recently-formed magnetar—a spinning neutron star with an extremely high magnetic field.

But by repeating, FRB 121102 is an anomaly. For the vast majority of FRBs, scientists do not know where they come from or what is causing them.

In a study published in the journal Science, an international team of researchers has announced they have discovered where a single FRB came from—a galaxy over four billion light-years away. The burst, named FRB 18092, was first identified in September, 2018 using the 36-antenna Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope.

After the initial event, the team, led by Keith Bannister of Australia's Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), used the tiny differences in the time it took for the light from the signal to reach various telescope antennas to zoom in on the where the FRB came from.

Not only were they able to trace it to the galaxy it came from, they were also able to find its position within the galaxy—in the "galactic suburbs." "It's a very average galaxy," study author Ryan Shannon, from Australia's Swinburne University of Technology, told Newsweek. "The burst comes from the outskirts of it, away from the center of the galaxy."

The galaxy where FRB 18092 came from is very different to that of FRB 121102. "If anything the galaxy has an old stellar population," Shannon said. "This is in contrast to the repeater which has a young stellar population."

The team does not know what celestial event caused the burst, and finding that the

two known FRB locations are very different raises even more questions: "Astronomers providing explanations for fast radio bursts will need to take pause given this discovery," Shannon said. "A lot of the theory of what causes FRBs is built around the first repeater, its host galaxy and environment. The fact that the hosts are so different means that if there is only one source, there would need to be a re-think of the theory. If not....there could be different ways to produce the bursts."

He also said that given there are thousands of FRBs in the sky every day, a single catastrophic event may not be sufficient to explain these mystery signals: "It would need to be a catastrophic event that occurs relatively regularly."

However, he added: "It's hard to rule out magnetars, as they are the only objects we know of that have the power to produce the intense radio pulses we see from FRBs. There's been a second channel proposed to form magnetars—the merger of white dwarf stars. These would be found in the outskirts of old galaxies."

The discovery has been welcomed by astronomers. Jason W. T. Hessels, from the University of Amsterdam, who was not involved in the study, said it was a "seminal result." He told Newsweek: "To understand the physical origin(s) of FRBs, and whether there are multiple types of FRB generators, we absolutely need precision localisations that unambiguously identify the host galaxies of these sources. The fact that this FRB is in a host galaxy that is quite unlike the dwarf galaxy of the first repeater, FRB 121102, indeed suggests that they could be from different types of objects, and that repeating and non-repeating FRBs come from physically distinct source types. However, more precision localisations are needed for us to build up a clear picture of what's going on."

Paul Scholz, from Canada's Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory, who was also not involved, told Newsweek: "The second localization presented in [the study] is different from FRB 121102 in almost every way: the source is not repeating, it was found to be in a large galaxy with an old population of stars, and most of the other pieces of evidence that support the young magnetar theory aren't present.

"This means that either 1) this FRB is caused by a different type of source than FRB 121102, or 2) the source that causes both FRBs is the same, but can occur in both dwarf galaxies with young recently-formed stars and massive galaxies with older, evolved stars. (1) would mean that there are multiple phenomena that can generate FRBs and (2) would limit the types of phenomena that could cause FRBs to those that can occur in both young and old environments.

"To disentangle these two possibilities we'll need to build up more host galaxy identifications, so I'm looking forward to further results from ASKAP and other telescopes that can provide these precise localizations."

Shannon said the team hopes to find even more bursts. If they are able to trace more FRBs back to their host galaxies, they will be able to start finding similarities that could help solve the mystery. Should they find out what is causing these radio signals, it may open up a new way for scientists to study the universe, he added. </s> For the first time, a single burst of cosmic radio waves has been traced to its point of origin: in this case, a galaxy about 3.6 billion light-years from Earth.

These radio bursts are only millisecond-long radio flashes, and such rapid bursts themselves aren’t rare in space. But finding out where they came from is incredibly difficult.

People love to believe that they’re from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, and this hypothesis hasn’t been ruled out entirely by researchers at Breakthrough Listen, a scientific research program dedicated to finding evidence of intelligent life in the universe.

Astronomers were able to pin down the source of a repeating fast radio burst in 2017. But single radio bursts are harder to pinpoint because they don’t reoccur.

The single radio burst, dubbed FRB 180924, was discovered by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder radio telescope, or ASKAP, in Western Australia.

Three of the largest telescopes around the world — Keck, Gemini South and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope — were able to image the burst. The findings of this observation were published Thursday in the journal Science.

Fast radio bursts, often referred to as FRBs, were first discovered by astronomers in 2007. The quest to discover more radio bursts since then has uncovered 85, including a couple that repeat from the same location.

“This is the big breakthrough that the field has been waiting for since astronomers discovered fast radio bursts,” said Keith Bannister, lead study author and principal research engineer at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency.

Because the bursts are so short and hard to track, Bannister’s team found a way to freeze and save data collected by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder in a fraction of a second after the telescope detects a burst.

Data from the detection was used to create a map showing the point of origin. The burst came from a galaxy about the size of our own, 3.6 billion light-years away. It’s on the outskirts of that galaxy.

“If we were to stand on the Moon and look down at the Earth with this precision, we would be able to tell not only which city the burst came from, but which postcode — and even which city block,” Bannister said.

“We identified the burst’s home galaxy and even its exact starting point, 13,000 light-years out from the galaxy’s centre in the galactic suburbs,” Adam Deller, an author of the study and an associate professor at the Swinburne University of Technology’s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, said in a statement.

Compared with the origin point of the repeating fast radio burst detected in 2017, this single source origin is very different.

The repeating burst came from a small galaxy full of forming stars. The single burst came from a massive galaxy that has low rates of star formation.

“This suggests that fast radio bursts can be produced in a variety of environments, or that seemingly one-off bursts detected so far by ASKAP are generated by a different mechanism to the repeater,” Deller said.

Of course, the biggest mystery of fast radio bursts in space endures: Why do they happen? But knowing where they come from is a giant step in the right direction of understanding them.

The bursts can act like a signature for decoding the space between star systems.

“These bursts are altered by the matter they encounter in space,” said Jean-Pierre Macquart, study author and associate professor at the Curtin Institute for Radio Astronomy., in a statement “Now we can pinpoint where they come from, we can use them to measure the amount of matter in intergalactic space.” </s> A mysterious burst of fast, cosmic radio waves has been traced to a galaxy about 3.6 billion light-years from Earth.

The significant discovery was made by an Australian-led international team of scientists using three of the world’s largest telescopes, The Independent reported. The findings were published Thursday in the journal Science.

Scientists first discovered fast radio bursts, known as FRBs, in 2007, said lead study author Keith Bannister, of Australia’s national science agency.

The source of a repeating fast radio burst was tracked in 2017, CNN reported. A single FRB hadn’t been tracked to its source until now.

Scientists tracked the single radio burst, named FRB 180924, to a galaxy about the same size as our own, 3.6 billion light-years away. It was discovered by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder radio telescope, or ASKAP, in Western Australia.

“If we were to stand on the Moon and look down at the Earth with this precision, we would be able to tell not only which city the burst came from, but which postcode and even which city block,” Bannister said.

The repeating burst detected in 2017 came from a small galaxy full of forming stars. The single burst came from a large galaxy with little star formation.

"This suggests that fast radio bursts can be produced in a variety of environments, or that seemingly one-off bursts detected so far by ASKAP are generated by a different mechanism to the repeater," said Adam Deller, an author of the study and an associate professor at the Swinburne University of Technology's Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing.

The question of what causes the bursts still remains. But tracking their source brings scientists one step closer to understanding them. </s> Scientists involved in a $100 million initiative to search for alien life have detected 15 mysterious signals coming from a galaxy 3 billion light-years away.

These signals, known as fast radio bursts, are a new batch of radio emissions emanating from a source dubbed the ‘repeater’ – the first FRB ever known to repeat.

According to the experts with Breakthrough Listen, the discovery confirms the source is in a newly active state, and marks the first time FRBs have been detected at higher frequencies.

Scientists involved in a $100 million initiative to search for alien life have detected 15 mysterious signals coming from a galaxy 3 billion light-years away. The animation shows 14 of the 15 bursts in succession, illustrating their dispersed spectrum and extreme variability

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are radio emissions that appear temporarily and randomly, making them not only hard to find, but also hard to study. The mystery stems from the fact it is not known what could produce such a short and sharp burst. This has led some to speculate they could be anything from stars colliding to artificially created messages. The first FRB was spotted, or rather 'heard' by radio telescopes, back in 2007. But it was so temporary and seemingly random that it took years for astronomers to agree it wasn't a glitch in one of the telescope's instruments.

Breakthrough Listen, backed by Mark Zuckerberg, Stephen Hawking, and billionaire Yuri Milner, has been gathering data with the Green Bank Radio Telescope in West Virginia, Lick Observatory’s Automated Planet Finder on Mt Hamilton in California, and the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia.

While it remains unknown whether the 15 newly detected pulses are signs of intelligent alien life, or instead stem from natural processes in the distant universe, the scientists do known that these radio emissions left their host galaxy long before multi-cellular life even existed on Earth.

The signals come from a source known as FRB 121102, which became the first FRB to have its location pinpointed after scientists in a 2016 study traced it to a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light years away.

When the 15 pulses left this dwarf galaxy, the entire solar system was just 2 billion years old.

The new FRBs were spotted this weekend by a team led by UC Berkeley Postdoctoral Researcher Dr. Vishal Gajjar, who accumulated 400 TB of data on the object over a period of 5 hours.

The researchers observed the entire 4 to 8 GHz frequency band, searching for signals across a broad range of frequencies, with a characteristic dispersion, or delays caused by the presence of gas in space, according to Breakthrough Listen.

‘On Saturday, August 26 at 13:51:44 UTC we initiated observations of the well-known repeating fast radio burst FRB 121102 using the Breakthrough Listen Digital Backend with the C-band receiver at the Green Bank Telescope,’ the team wrote in The Astronomer’s Telegram.

And, in doing this, the researchers found for the first time that the FRBs can emit at much higher frequencies than previously known.

In their observation, the team noted the appearance of several bursts that peaked in brightness at frequencies above 6 GHz.

The brightest, they say, occurred at around 7 GHz.

FRB 121102, or ‘the repeater,’ was first detected in 2012.

Then in 2015, scientists saw it again, making it the first FRB seen to repeat.

Subsequent research identified a cradle of young stars 2.4 billion light years away as the source of the mysterious fast radio bursts detected on Earth.

But, the mechanism that generates these signals still remains a mystery.

Scientists have posed all sorts of explanations, from outbursts from rotating neutron stars to energy sources from alien deep-space explorers.

This past spring, the Breakthrough Listen ream released their initial results from their first year of observation.

After combing through petabytes of data, the Breakthrough Listen team has ranked 11 events considered to be most significant – but so far, they’ve found no convincing signs of intelligent life.

The team also submitted a paper analyzing nearly 700 stars across all spectral types, which they say acts as a ‘launch pad’ for deeper investigations to come. </s> Scientists have, for the first time, pinpointed the source of a mysterious one-off pulse of cosmic energy known as a fast radio burst.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) have perplexed researchers for years, appearing as fleeting signals from the distant universe that can’t yet be explained definitively.

It’s thought that these brief flashes may come from black holes or neutron stars, though some have even speculated they may be of alien origin.

While scientists recently were able to trace the origin of a repeating FRB, which pulsed numerous times over a span of months, finding the source of a single burst that lasts less than a millisecond is far more challenging.

In a remarkable breakthrough, an Australian-led team with the Gemini South telescope in Chile says they’ve traced a single FRB to a galaxy roughly 3.6 billion light-years away.

‘It is especially challenging to pinpoint FRBs that only flash once and are gone,’ says Keith Bannister of Australia’s Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), who led the Australian team.

The one-off FRB, known as FRB 180924, was spotted in September 2018 using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope.

This radio telescope array has 36 antennas working together as a single instrument to scour the skies for FRBs.

By calculating the minute differences in the amount of time light reaches each of the 36 antennas, the team says it was able to trace the burst back to its home.

‘From these tiny time differences — just a fraction of a billionth of a second — we identified the burst’s home galaxy,’ said team member Adam Deller, of Swinburne University of Technology.

The team then further analyzed the distance and other characteristics using Gemini South telescope, along with the W.M. Keck Observatory and European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT).

‘The Gemini South data absolutely confirmed that the light left the galaxy about 4 billion years ago,’ said Nicolas Tejos of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, who led the Gemini observations.

‘When we managed to get a position for FRB 180924 that was good to 0.1 arcsecond, we knew that it would tell us not just which object was the host galaxy, but also where within the host galaxy it occurred,’ said Deller.

‘We found that the FRB was located away from the galaxy’s core, out in the ‘galactic suburbs.”’

The breakthrough could be a step toward finally understanding what gives rise to FRBs in the first place, the researchers say.

It could also lead to more efficient ways of pinpointing their origins.

‘Much like gamma-ray bursts two decades ago, or the more recent detection of gravitational wave events, we stand on the cusp of an exciting new era where we are about to learn where fast radio bursts take place,’ said team member Stuart Ryder of Macquarie University, Australia.

‘Ultimately though, our goal is to use FRBs as cosmological probes, in much the same way that we use gamma ray bursts, quasars, and supernovae.’ </s> An Indian scientist recently discovered 15 repeating radio bursts emitted by a dwarf galaxy after observing it for five hours.

Here's all you need to know about the finding:

1. This discovery was made by Breakthrough Listen postdoctoral researcher Vishal Gajjar, who was detecting extraterrestrials. The dwarf galaxy that gave out these 15 electromagnetic emissions is located at a distance of around 3 million light years from Earth.

2. Breakthrough Listen was launched in 2015 as an initiative to find signs of intelligent life in the universe. As per the hypotheses of the researchers, these emissions could be from an energy source that is being utilised by extraterrestrial civilisations to fuel their spaceships.

"Bursts from this source have never been seen at this high a frequency," said Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Centre and a member of the Breakthrough Listen programme.

ALSO READ: Bizarre alien technology spotted in a new UFO sighting in Germany? [VIDEO]

3. "When the recently-detected pulses left their host galaxy, our entire Solar System was just 2 billion years old," said Breakthrough Listen in a statement, referring to the 15 fast radio bursts (FRBs).

It added: "Life on Earth consisted of only single-celled organisms, and it would be another billion years before even the simplest multi-cellular life began to evolve."

4. The Parkes Telescope in Australia had spotted FRBs for the first time. The phenomenon was later observed by numerous radio telescopes across the world. FRBs are basically radiant emissions from distant galaxies.

ALSO READ: NASA's Cassini is heading towards its Grand Finale on September 15: Top things to know

5. The sources of FRBs are distant and usually unidentified. Discovered on November 2, 2012, FRB 121102 is believed to be the source of these 15 radio bursts. FRB 121102 is the only one known to repeat: More than 150 high-energy bursts have been observed coming from the object. It was identified last year as a dwarf galaxy located 3 million light years from Earth.

6. Researchers are trying to understand what leads to the formation of FRBs, and the dwarf galaxy has turned into the main target for all the monitoring operations carried out across the world.

"As well as confirming that the source is in a newly active state, the high resolution of the data obtained by the Listen instrument will allow measurement of the properties of these mysterious bursts at a higher precision than ever possible before," said the Breakthrough Listen statement. </s> Three and a half billion years ago, a mysterious object on the edge of a distant galaxy spewed forth an intensely bright, vanishingly brief burst of radio energy that shot across the universe.

That pulse of energy — known to its fans in the astronomy community as a fast radio burst (FRB) — passed through a wilderness of gas, dust and empty space on its multi-billion-year journey, slowly stretching and changing color as it moved. Then, for less than a millisecond in 2018, that burst zapped past a special telescope in Earth's Australian outback, giving scientists a rare opportunity to shake hands with one of the most mysterious forms of energy in the universe.

It's the first time that astronomers have successfully tracked a one-off FRB back to its origins across space and time, according to the authors of a study published today (June 27) in the journal Science. Understanding where FRBs come from allows scientists to probe the vast tracts of matter between their host galaxies and Earth, and maybe even locate undiscovered pockets of protons and neutrons thought to be lurking between galaxies.[The 12 Strangest Objects in the Universe]

"These bursts are altered by the matter they encounter in space," study co-author Jean-Pierre Macquart, a researcher at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) said in a statement. "Now we can pinpoint where they come from, we can use them to measure the amount of matter in intergalactic space."

Since the phenomenon was discovered in 2007, astronomers have observed about 85 FRBs and pinpointed the origins of only one other — a repeating flash that pulsed 9 times from a tiny, star-forming galaxy over about six months in 2016. Pinpointing the source of a one-off FRB, which can last for a fraction of a millisecond, has proved exceedingly difficult, until now.

In their new study, the researchers detected the lone FRB using an array of 36 satellites called the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope. When an FRB passes the array, each satellite picks up the burst's signal a fraction of a millisecond apart. Using these subtle time differences, the researchers were able to figure out which direction the burst came from, and approximately how far it traveled.

The ASKAP observations pointed to a Milky-Way-size galaxy about 3.6 billion light-years away from Earth. With some help from several other large telescopes around the world, the researchers zoomed in on this galaxy to learn that it was relatively old and not forming many new stars.

According Adam Deller, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia and co-author of the new study, the properties of this distant galaxy sit in stark contrast to the galaxy that created a repeating fast-radio burst that was detected in 2016.

"The burst we localized and its host galaxy look nothing like the 'repeater' and its host," Deller said in the statement. "It comes from a massive galaxy that is forming relatively few stars. This suggests that fast radio bursts can be produced in a variety of environments."

While the repeating FRB detected a few years ago was likely created by a neutron star or supernova explosion (common engines of star formation in active galaxies), this individual burst could have been caused by something else entirely, the researchers wrote.

What else, exactly? Nobody knows yet — but radioactive belches from supermassive black holes or the engines of alien spacecraft have not been ruled out. Only by pinpointing more FRBs will researchers be able to unravel this cosmic mystery. Fortunately, the authors of the new study wrote, now that they've got one under their belt, finding the next one should be a little easier. </s> The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope, located at CSIRO’s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia. (Photo: CSIRO / Dragonfly Media)

An astronomical breakthrough has been made, and it may help us understand the evolution of the universe.

Astronomers have made history by detecting the precise location of a powerful, superfast, burst of cosmic radio waves some four billion light-years from Earth.

Fast radio bursts are bright, powerful blasts of radio energy that travel across vast intergalactic expanses. When they reach Earth they are often only electromagnetic whispers which last milliseconds and require sensitive radio telescopes to detect.

The first fast radio bursts were discovered only in 2007 and since then experts have managed to observe only 85 of them. In just one millisecond they emit as much energy as the Sun in 80 years. If one burst in the Sun, it would pop all the popcorn in the Solar System out as far as Neptune.

No one had been able to successfully determine a precise location in the universe of any of these fast radio bursts. Until now.

The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope in Western Australia, of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), was able to pinpoint such a location. The results were published in the peer review journal Science on the evening of Thursday 27 June.

The team made a high-resolution map showing that the burst originated in the outskirts of a Milky Way-sized galaxy about four billion light-years away from us. This galaxy is forming few new stars. The fast radio burst happened on the outskirts of this galaxy, 13,000 light-years from its centre.

Due to this, the team developed new technology to freeze and save ASKAP data less than a second after a burst arrives at the telescope. ASKAP is a 36-dish radio telescope, spread over 6km, but it works as one massive telescope. (Watch the video here.)

The burst had to travel a different distance to each dish, reaching them all at a slightly different time.

“From these tiny time differences – just a fraction of a billionth of a second – we identified the burst’s home galaxy and even its exact starting point, 13,000 light-years out from the galaxy’s centre in the galactic suburbs,” a team member, Dr Adam Deller of Swinburne University of Technology said.

The secret is in this time difference: Astronomers compare the time of arrival of the fast radio burst, at each dish using the raw data (which is truly astronomical) – they measure the difference in arrival time to around 1/10th of a nanosecond. First, a custom-designed ASKAP “beamformer” hardware averaged the data down to one billion measurements per second, slow enough that a dedicated computer can search in real-time. When the fast radio burst happened, the software detected it within 0.5 seconds, stopped the search, and downloaded raw data from each dish.

This enabled the team to measure the position of the fast radio burst with a precision of 1/50,000th of a degree. Or the width of a human hair 200m away.

The team said they found one fast radio burst in 600 trillion measurements. It is not that fast radio bursts are rare, according to the team there are about 2,000 per day. The problem is the radio telescopes can cover only a small fraction of the sky

“If we were to stand on the Moon and look down at the Earth with this precision, we would be able to tell not only which city the burst came from, but which postcode – and even which city block.”

Three optical telescopes, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, the Keck telescope in Hawaii and the Gemini South telescope in Chile were also used to link image to the galaxy.

Previously two other fast radio bursts were known to “repeat” themselves. When experts looked at the same place they saw them again.

Dr Jean-Pierre Macquart, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, said:

“These bursts are altered by the matter they encounter in space. Now we can pinpoint where they come from, we can use them to measure the amount of matter in intergalactic space.”

One unanswered question is: What is the cause of fast radio bursts? It is as yet an unsolved cosmic mystery. It can’t be predicted in advance and by the time experts realise they are happening the event has passed.

Astronomers are pondering another question: How does the universe produce a radio burst that is thousands of times brighter than all the radio emission from the rest of its entire host galaxy – and switch it on and off within a millisecond? This is the next discovery waiting.

By observing many fast radio bursts astronomers would be able to determine what causes them, but also use them as a tool to investigate the cosmic web. This is a network of filaments of dark matter between galaxies and galaxy clusters, important in the understanding of the evolution of the universe.

The distribution of galaxies and matter in the universe is not random. Galaxies are organised, even today, in an enormous cosmic web. This web has dense regions made up of galaxy clusters and groups, sparsely populated regions devoid of galaxies, as well as the filaments that link dense regions, according to a previous study in the Astrophysical Journal.

According to the article in Science if many fast radio bursts are mapped, then the cosmic web and its intergalactic material can finally be studied properly.

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*Proteas, you know we love you. We’d just love you more if you won occasionally... </s> A sequence of 14 of the 15 detected bursts illustrate their dispersed spectrum and extreme variability. The streaks across the colored energy plot are the bursts appearing at different times and different energies because of dispersion caused by 3 billion years of travel through intergalactic space. In the top frequency spectrum, the dispersion has been removed to show the 300 microsecond pulse spike. Capturing this diverse set of bursts was made possible by the broad bandwidth that can be processed by the Breakthrough Listen backend at the Green Bank Telescope. Credit: University of California - Berkeley

Breakthrough Listen, an initiative to find signs of intelligent life in the universe, has detected 15 brief but powerful radio pulses emanating from a mysterious and repeating source – FRB 121102 – far across the universe.

Fast radio bursts are brief, bright pulses of radio emission from distant but largely unknown sources, and FRB 121102 is the only one known to repeat: more than 150 high-energy bursts have been observed coming from the object, which was identified last year as a dwarf galaxy about 3 billion light years from Earth.

Possible explanations for the repeating bursts range from outbursts from rotating neutron stars with extremely strong magnetic fields – so-called magnetars – to a more speculative idea: They are directed energy sources, powerful laser bursts used by extraterrestrial civilizations to power spacecraft, akin to Breakthrough Starshot's plan to use powerful laser pulses to propel nano-spacecraft to Earth's nearest star, Proxima Centauri.

"Bursts from this source have never been seen at this high a frequency," said Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and of the Breakthrough Listen program.

As astronomers around the globe try to understand the mechanism generating fast radio bursts, they have repeatedly turned their radio telescopes on FRB 121102. Siemion and his team alerted the astronomical community to the high-frequency activity via an Astronomer's Telegram on Monday evening, Aug. 28.

"As well as confirming that the source is in a newly active state, the high resolution of the data obtained by the Listen instrument will allow measurement of the properties of these mysterious bursts at a higher precision than ever possible before," said Breakthrough Listen postdoctoral researcher Vishal Gajjar, who discovered the increased activity.

First detected with the Parkes Telescope in Australia, fast radio bursts have now been seen by several radio telescopes around the world. FRB 121102 was discovered on Nov. 2, 2012, (hence its name) and in 2015 it was the first fast radio burst seen to repeat, ruling out theories of bursts' origins that involved the catastrophic destruction of the progenitor, at least in this instance.

Regardless of FRB 121102's ultimate source, when the recently detected pulses left their host galaxy, our solar system was less than 2 billion years old, noted Steve Croft, a Breakthrough Listen astronomer at UC Berkeley. Life on Earth consisted only of single-celled organisms; it would be another billion years before even the simplest multi-cellular life began to evolve.

As part of Breakthrough Listen's program to observe nearby stars and galaxies for signatures of extraterrestrial technology, the project science team at UC Berkeley added FRB 121102 to its list of targets. In the early hours of Saturday, Aug. 26, Gajjar observed that area of the sky using the Breakthrough Listen backend instrument at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.

The instrument accumulated 400 terabytes (a million million bytes) of data over a five-hour period, observing across the entire 4 to 8 GHz frequency band. This large dataset was searched for signatures of short pulses from the source over a broad range of frequencies, with a characteristic dispersion, or delay as a function of frequency, caused by the presence of gas in space between Earth and the source. The distinctive shape that the dispersion imposes on the initial pulse is an indicator of the amount of material between us and the source, and hence an indicator of the distance to the host galaxy.

Analysis by Gajjar and the Breakthrough Listen team revealed 15 new pulses from FRB 121102. The observations show for the first time that fast radio bursts emit at higher frequencies than previously observed, with the brightest emission occurring at around 7 GHz.

"The extraordinary capabilities of the backend receiver, which is able to record several gigahertz of bandwidth at a time, split into billions of individual channels, enable a new view of the frequency spectrum of FRBs, and should shed additional light on the processes giving rise to FRB emission." Gajjar said.

"Whether or not fast radio bursts turn out to be signatures of extraterrestrial technology, Breakthrough Listen is helping to push the frontiers of a new and rapidly growing area of our understanding of the universe around us," Siemion said.

Explore further Mysterious bursts of energy do come from outer space
Scientists announce, through the Science journal, that they discover the source of a fast radio burst for the first time. FRB 180924, a non-repeating FRB which was detected in September 2018 using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, originates from a large galaxy known as DES J214425.25−405400.81 located 3.6 billion light-years from Earth.