Big Bubble of Plasma in Space Shoots Fast Radio Burst Toward Earth | Space

A team of researchers believes the flurry of radio waves emanating from deep space came from a bubble of plasma surrounding a compact object, one of the universe’s densest entities.

The waves were a fast radio burst, or FRB, an enigmatic class of radio waves characterized by their brilliance and their unpredictable lengths. Many are fleeting, but some are very reliable; one source described by a different team last year blinked every 22 minutes for 30 years.

Astronomers discovered the burst, called FRB20201124A, in 2020, spewing from a source about 1.3 billion light-years away. Last year, a different team of researchers found the most distant FRB yet, coming from a source about 10 billion light-years away. Thus, the more recently analyzed burst practically seems local. A paper published this week in Nature described the nature of its origin

“We were able to demonstrate through observations that the persistent emission observed along with some fast radio bursts behaves as expected from the nebular emission model, i.e. a ‘bubble’ of ionized gas that surrounds the central engine,” said Gabriele Bruni, a researcher at the National Institute for Astrophysics and lead author of the new paper, in an INAF release.

Fast radio bursts are flurries of radio waves that generate “as much energy in a thousandth of a second as the Sun does in a…