Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts in Space Keep Getting Stranger

For the very first time fast radio burst was detected in 2007, astronomer have been attempting to understand the strange flashes of radio bursts emanating from deep space.

Few signals blip at astonishing regular intervals whereas some blast out very strong flashes instantly, flaming ground-based radio dishes just like Christmas tree for a nanosecond.

Some FRBs release as much power in less than a second as the Sun emits in few days. One signal that astonished researchers this year had been pulsing every 20 minutes since at least 1988.

And while Astronomers can still only estimate as to what's beyond them, the newest fast radio signal that was just invented is making it more mysterious — and showing just how much knowledge is still pending about the celestial phenomenon.

As mentioned in a latest study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society this week, astronomers detected a "never-before-seen" burst dubbed FRB 20220912A with the help of the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array, a collection of 42 antennae extending across the Cascade Mountains in California.

From two months, the team spotted 35 signals from a single means. Unlike last FRBs that persisted over time, the team observed that the signal lost in the center frequency of the bursts, type of like a "celestial slide whistle," as CNN put it.

Regardless their best efforts, the team was incapable to find a constant timing between each bursts. Unusual as that, the discoveries could still contribute astronomers to figure out from where to seek more signs like it.

"This work is interesting because it gives both surety of known FRB affects and the invention of some new ones," said SETI Institute researcher and lead study author Sofia Sheikh in a statement.

Astronomers are finding the origin behind these FRBs. One popular theory since put forth is that these signals could be given by the highly magnetized remains of a collapsed star that might be releasing these radio waves like a cosmic lighthouse.

"We’re compressing the source of FRBs, for instance, to extreme objects like magnetars, but no current model can describe all of the features that have been noticed till now," Sheikh added.