Fast Radio Burst

A fast radio burst is very much like what it sounds. It's a very fast burst of radio waves. It comes from outer space, a long way away. And by fast, I mean really fast. So it starts and stops in about a thousandth of a second, so you click your fingers, and it's finished. Fast radio bursts are a real mystery. We don't exactly understand where they com from, or what actually makes them. And there's a lot of open questions that we really don't have an answer for. There are probably more theories about what makes fast radio bursts, than there actual detections of these things. So since 2007 we've only had 20, but there are probably 30 or 40 different theories on what makes them. The most interesting thing about this burst is the fact that we found it with the Australian square kilometre ray path finder. So that is, it wasn't really obvious that we would be able to do this, as well as we ended up being able to do it. So this telescope is really a fantastic telescope. In fact it's probably the best telescope on the planet at the moment for finding these bursts. So whereas in the past it's taken ten years to find twenty bursts, once we're really going with this new instrument, we'll able to find them much more quickly. One or two every week. And that will blow open the field. We'll be able to do much more detailed studies of these things, get better statistics, understand what, hopefully understand what they are, and where they're coming from.