More news on fast radio bursts: first discovery of one that keeps bursting

Ars Technica : A week ago, a team of researchers claimed they had identified the source of a fast radio burst (FRB) for the first time, only to have another team of researchers call that research into question . Now yet another team has come forward with unexpected and groundbreaking news about FRBs: Instead of being one-off events, at least some FRBs can be repeating signals. An FRB is exactly what it sounds like, an extremely short-duration burst of high-energy radio waves. Because none had been found that repeated, it was considered likely that they were caused by the destruction of something. The new finding—an FRB that repeated itself 11 times over the span of two months—suggests that at least some FRBs don’t fit that model. The repeated signals, which the researchers found using the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, varied in brightness and peak wavelengths and were not regularly periodic. Besides the repetition, the new FRBs differed from other FRBs in two more ways: They had about a tenth of the energy and appeared to have originated from within the Milky Way galaxy. The researchers point out that most previous FRBs had been spotted by Australia’s Parkes telescope, which doesn’t have the sensitivity of the Arecibo telescope and could not have detected FRBs like the newly discovered repeating one.