Fast radio bursts (FRBs) were first detected in 2001, and until then astronomers had never seen anything like it. Since then, astronomers have discovered several dozen FRBs, but they still don't know what is causing these rapid and powerful bursts of radio emission.
For the first time, two astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Center, USA, Anastasia Fialkov and Avi Loeb, estimated the amount of FRBs occurring every second in the entire observable part of the Universe. According to this work, approximately one fast radio burst occurs in our Universe every second.
In this new study, Fialkov and Loweb assumed that FRB 121102, a fast radio burst emanating from a galaxy about 3 billion light-years away, is representative of all other FRBs. Since this FRB has erupted in several flares since its discovery in 2002, astronomers have been able to study it in much more detail than other FRBs. Using this information, they were able to calculate approximately how much FRB could theoretically be observed across the entire night sky.
The work was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.