An international team of researchers including scientists
from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn have detected burst
of radio waves that appear to have originated billions of light years away -
when the Universe was just 6 to 9 billion years old. The researchers are still
baffled about the origins of these emissions. In the future, they intend to use
these flashes to probe the intergalactic space.
Four Fast Radio Bursts or FRBs with durations of only a few
milliseconds were detected at high Galactic latitudes in the southern sky. The
extremely short duration of the bursts and the inferred great distance imply
that they have been caused by some cataclysmic cosmological event, such as two
merging neutron stars or a star dying or being swallowed by a black hole.