Astronomers Find 25 Hugely Powerful Fast Radio Bursts That Keep Repeating - ScienceAlert

While astronomers are still unsure what causes them and opinions vary, dedicated observatories and international collaborations have dramatically increased the number of events available for study.

Despite their mysterious nature, FRBs are ubiquitous and the best estimates indicate that events arrive at Earth roughly a thousand times a day over the entire sky.

While some are believed to be caused by neutron stars and black holes(attributable to the high-energy density of their surroundings), others continue to defy classification.

For this reason, astronomers and cosmologists refer to this period as the 'Dark Ages', which ended roughly 1 billion years after the Big Bang as the first stars and galaxies began reionizing neutral hydrogen (the Reionization Era).

As Dunlap Postdoctoral Fellow and lead author Ziggy Pleunis told Universe Today, each FRB is described by its position in the sky and a quantity known as its Dispersion Measure (DM).

In a paper released in August 2021, the CHIME/FRB Collaboration presented the first large-sample catalog of FRBs containing 536 events detected by CHIME between 2018 and 2019, including 62 bursts from 18 previously reported repeating sources.