It's been said that we know more about the galaxy and space than we do about our own oceans. For as long as anyone can remember, or for as long as anyone could harness the ability to look up into the sky, humanity has been charting the stars. Some give clusters of stars names.
Others will follow those stars and assign certain additions to them, like meaning or how to categorize how someone acts on a certain day in a certain month of a certain year. Despite us constantly looking into space, none of us ever really know everything about it since space is constantly expanding. With all these factors coming into exploring space, astronomers were baffled when they picked up a burst of radio waves were picked up from a galaxy 2.5 billion light years away.
For the first time, according to The Washington Post, astronomers and scientists have noticed a burst of radio waves and were able to make certain of the source. Fast radio bursts (FRB) are extremely brief but at the same time extremely powerful, flaring with the power of 500 million suns.
The fact that they are so unpredictable makes it extremely difficult to spot as scientists have studied only 18 of these out of the possible 10,000 times a day they could be heard. To make things harder, it sounds as if they are coming from all over, making it effectively more difficult to spot a source.
Shami Chatterjee, one of the astronomers that located the FRBs as reported by National Geographic, states, "We do not have eyes in the sky in the way people imagine," and that despite all of their monitoring and staring up at the sky, they are only monitoring but a tiny portion of everything that is out there.
The speculation can come from a few things, two of which being either a largely cataclysmic event that would induce such FRBs to spread out over such a vast expanse of space and time or an FRB that could be repeated. One thing is for sure: this discovery opens a multitude of possibilities for exploring the vast corners of space as we know it.
