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Mysterious fast radio bursts come in two distinct flavours

A trove of new detections suggests that the bursts could be the result of at least two separate astrophysical phenomena.
  1. Davide Castelvecchi
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A radio telescope in Canada has detected 535 fast radio bursts, quadrupling the known tally of these brief, highly energetic phenomena in one go. The long-awaited results show that these enigmatic events come in two distinct types — most bursts are one-off events, with a minority repeating periodically and lasting at least ten times longer on average.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01560-4

References

  1. The CHIME/FRB Collaboration. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.04352 (2021).

  2. Spitler, L. G. et al. Nature 531, 202–205 (2016).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  3. Kirsten, F. et al. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.11445 (2021).

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