3rd Mysterious Deep-Space Flash Traced to Host Galaxy

By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | July 3, 2019 07:14am ET

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Known to locals as "the Big Ears," the Owens Valley Radio Observatory is located near Bishop, California
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Astronomers just pinpointed the source galaxy of another fast radio burst (FRB), suggesting that these brief and bizarre cosmic blasts may not remain mysterious for much longer.

The newfound explosion — known as FRB 190523 because it was spotted on May 23 of this year — was traced to a big galaxy about 7.9 billion light-years away from Earth, researchers announced in a study published online July 2 in the journal Nature.

The find brings the number of localized FRBs to three, out of about 85 total detected blasts. FRBs are so hard to track down because the vast majority of them are one-offs — millisecond-long bursts that never recur. Indeed, only two "repeaters" have been observed to date.

In 2017, astronomers managed to trace one of these rare repeaters, FRB 121102, to a dwarf galaxy about 3 billion light-years away.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/65859-mysterious-deep-space-flash-host-galaxy.html