Fast Bursts

When astronomers find a new type of object that goes “boom,” it takes a while to explain it. They have to figure out how far away the objects are, which reveals how bright they are. And they have to see them at different wavelengths to understand what they’re doing.
They’re just starting that process for a class of objects known as fast radio bursts — blasts of radio waves that last no more than a few thousandths of a second. The first was discovered in 2007, and a few dozen others have been seen since then.
Theorists have proposed several explanations for the bursts — from mergers between stellar corpses, to flares on the surfaces of highly magnetized corpses.
The effort to understand them has been stymied because astronomers hadn’t seen any of the bursts at other wavelengths. But that changed with a burst that was discovered in November of 2013.
A space telescope was looking at the same region of sky where the radio burst was discovered. An analysis, reported late last year, showed t