Astronomers just quintupled the number of known repeating fast radio bursts
The new haul could help reveal what causes these cryptic flashes of radio waves from deep space
Astronomers have found eight new fast radio bursts that flash on and off.
That new haul brings the total of known repeating fast radio bursts, or FRBs, to 10, compared with the 60 or so nonrepeating FRBs that have been spotted, researchers report August 9 at arXiv.org. Studying the cryptic bursts could reveal what phenomena cause these brief, brilliant flares of radio waves from deep space.
The first nonrepeating burst was discovered only in 2007, so “FRBs are still quite new,” says astrophysicist Cherry Ng of the University of Toronto. But “the repeater population is larger than we might think. They’re not that unique,” she says.
Ng and colleagues spotted the newly discovered repeating FRBs using the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME, in British Columbia. The telescope also found the second known repeating FRB in August 2018 (SN: 2/2/19, p. 12).