Rare, fleeting radio flashes in the sky have bewildered astronomers for more than a decade. These “fast radio bursts,” blips that flare and then disappear in a couple seconds or less, flit in and out of existence so quickly that astronomers struggle to study them, let alone pinpoint their cosmic provenance. The mystery deepened last week, when teams based in the Netherlands and Australia discovered evidence that these bursts are more common and more diverse in duration and energy than previously thought.
Since the 2000s, 750 confirmed bursts have been found at radio frequencies between 100 megahertz and 8 gigahertz, most of them by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment.