mindblowingscience:

Fast radio bursts, powerful pulses of radio energy of unknown cosmic origin, are a source of endless fascination to astronomers and alien conspiracy theory fodder to everybody else. But while most FRBs discovered to date are one-off events—a single chirp in the interstellar void, if you will—these phenomena got more interesting last year when astronomers discovered the very first FRB signal that repeats. Now, they’ve pinpointed its location.

FRB 121102, the only repeating fast radio burst know to science, is located over three billion light years away, in a dwarf galaxy a thousand times dimmer than the Milky Way, according to new research published today in Nature. Not only does the new analysis confirm that mysterious radio bursts emanate from a source far beyond our galaxy, zeroing in on their location means we can start unraveling what exactly that source is.

All we know at this point is that FRBs are coming from something powerful. “These radio flashes must have enormous amounts of energy to be visible from over 3 billion light-years away,” Cornell astronomer and lead study author Shami Chatterjee said in a statement.

“I think this is a really big deal, and I’m really excited about the result,” Peter Williams, an astronomer at Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics who was not involved with the study, told Gizmodo.

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Astronomers Pinpointed the Location of Multiple Weird Radio Bursts Beyond Our Galaxy