This story takes us out to the edge of the observable universe where a rare and brief event was spotted not once but three times. The event? Fast radio bursts (FRBs): millisecond long spikes in radio waves from distant objects, quite probably tiny dead stars with powerful magnetic fields called magnetars. 

Because FRBs are so very brief, you have to be looking in exactly the right direction at exactly the right time with just the right equipment to be able to see them. And until now, just not that many have been spotted. Astronomers using the 500-meter FAST telescope in China are working to change that and are conducting a survey to systematically look for FRBs and determine their locations and how common they actually are. 

In a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal with first author Chen-Hui Niu, the team published three new FRBs located 4-5.5 billion light-years away. Based on how large an area they observed and how long they observed, this team estimates that if we could observe the entire sky with the right instruments, we’d detect 120,000 FRBs every day.

This survey is our latest recipient of the BABIES award for “Bad Acronyms & Backronyms in Everyday Science”. The survey’s name is CRAFTS which stands for Commensal Radio Astronomy FAST Survey and has an acronym nested in an acronym and randomly uses the first and last letters of that nested acronym. Well played, acronym creators. Well played.

More Information

Chinese Academy of Sciences press release

“CRAFTS for Fast Radio Bursts: Extending the Dispersion–Fluence Relation with New FRBs Detected by FAST,” Chen-Hui Niu et al., 2021 March 3, The Astrophysical Journal Letters