Long ago, 15 bright radio pulses emerged from a dwarf galaxy about 3 billion light years away from Earth. Last Saturday, a telescope in a remote area of West Virginia picked up those signals from a distant corner of the universe, and yesterday, a group of astronomers and astrophysicists shared preliminary results on their observations. This is a newly active period from an unknown source that astronomers labelled FRB 121102. It’s a source of fast radio bursts (FRBs). We still don’t know much about FRBs. They were only first detected in 2001, and the first time we saw one—this one, in fact—repeat was in 2015. FRBs are exactly what they sound like: super fast, really powerful burst of radio signals. But we have no idea what causes them. "The repeating FRB source is an anomaly in the population right now; it's the only one of its kind," says Emily Petroff, a post-doctoral researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. Petroff was not involved in the current observations, but was part of the project that put together the definitive catalogue of Fast Radio Bursts last year. "We're trying hard to find more (either by checking to see if other FRBs repeat, or trying to find more FRBs and monitor them)," Petroff wrote in an email. "Keep in mind that the population is still really small. Only 30 FRB sources have been found, from 29 of those we've only seen one burst, from one of them we've seen over 200!" Read more http://www.popsci.com/strange-signals-distant-galaxy
