The signal is a million times brighter than others of its type.
Astronomers have detected a mysterious radio signal that is pulsing rhythmically"like a heartbeat" in deep space.
In 2020, the first-ever detection of an FRB within our own Milky Way galaxy enabled scientists to trace the FRB's origins to a magnetar, a highly magnetized, fast-rotating husk of a dead star. Magnetars, and their less magnetized cousins pulsars, are special types of neutron stars, which are ultradense stellar corpses left behind from the explosive deaths of stars.
The astronomers first spotted the new signal using the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment , a radio telescope designed to spot radio waves emitted by hydrogen at one of the earliest stages of the universe — when mysterious, hypothetical dark energy first caused the universe to begin expanding at an accelerating rate. On Dec. 21, 2019, while scanning the skies for distant hydrogen radio emissions, CHIME picked up the strange signal.