Something From Deep Space Is Blasting Earth with Mysterious ‘Fast Radio Bursts’

The first report of these “fast radio bursts” appeared in 2007. Duncan Lorimer and his colleagues had found the signal buried in recordings made at the Parkes radio telescope in Australia.

Lorimer argued at the time that the source of the burst came from way beyond our galaxy. But then the same telescope recorded more bursts that were similar, but clearly coming from something much closer by.

Isaiah 27:13 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the great trumpet shall be blown…

Close Encounters Of The Radio Kind? Mystery Bursts Baffle Astronomers

Astronomers have a mystery on their hands. Two large radio telescopes, on opposite sides of the planet, have detected very brief, very powerful bursts of radio waves.

Right now, astronomers have no idea what’s causing these bursts or where they’re coming from. And nothing has been ruled out at the moment — not even the kind of outrageous claims you’d expect to see in tabloid headlines.

The sky is full of strange radio bursts isn’t big news. Pulsars, the rotating “radio lighthouses,” of the universe, cause a steady flicker of signals in the eyes of Earth’s radio observatories, and astrophysicists are quite good at sorting them all out, pinning individual bursts to specific pulsars and using this data to further describe our galaxy in general. While these pulsars are typically thought of as rapidly spinning tops, completing rotations in timespans ranging from milliseconds to seconds, some of them spin so slowly that we’ve yet to see them completing a full rotation at all. These are called rotating radio transients (RRATs), which are signals from pulsars that spin very irregularly or have a very irregular magnitude of electromagnetic emission, sort of like a garden hose that keeps getting stepped on. 

RRATs were first described only in 2006, and just a year later the sky got even weirder with the discovery of fast radio bursts (FRBs). This category of signal is distinctly non-repeating, or at least in any observation so far. While this wouldn’t eliminate a pulsar necessarily (as they might still be shown to repeat in future observations), they also appear to originate outside of our galaxy, which we can infer based on their relatively slow speed and wider dispersion (think electrons per unit of volume) when they reach us here on Earth, compared to typical pulsar bursts that don’t have to make the journey across the intergalactic medium and are much sharper (less dispersed) on arrival.

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