Live Science
By
November 1, 2021
Astronomers have watched a mysterious cosmic object shoot out 1,652 blasts of energy over a short period of time. Though researchers are still stumped as to what caused the repeated eruptions, they hope the observations will help them get closer to an answer.
The entity in question is called a fast radio burst (FRB), an enigmatic phenomenon first observed in 2007. FRBs produce pulses in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum; these pulses last only a few thousandths of a second but produce as much energy as the sun does in a year.