Earlier this month, on October 9th, one of the most intense gamma ray bursts hit the Earth. It was spotted by a number of space telescopes including Nasa’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, and China’s High Energy Burst Searcher (HEBS) and Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (Insight-HXMT), according to an article by the South China Morning Post (SCMP) published on Friday. The telescopes were scanning the skies for cosmic explosions and now their scientists are weighing in on the incredible discovery.

New observations are challenging a hypothesis about what produces these energetic bursts of radio waves.

Mysterious fast radio bursts release as much energy as the Sun pours out in a year - and newly published research has deepened the mystery around them.

A peculiar repeating fast radio burst seems to be coming from a dynamic environment in an otherwise uninteresting region, leaving researchers scratching their heads as to the burst’s origin.

We have detected a strange new signal from across the chasm of time and space. A repeating fast radio burst source detected last year was recorded spitting out a whopping 1,863 bursts over 82 hours, amid a total of 91 hours of observation.

More than 15 years after fast radio bursts were discovered, new research has both unraveled and deepened the mystery of the sources of these deep space phenomena.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are intense pulses of radio wave energy that usually last only a matter of milliseconds and come from somewhere deep in the cosmos. Astrophysicists detect these signals emanating mostly from faraway galaxies, but they do not yet understand the origin of the pulses. The bursts are extremely intense at their source, putting out as much energy in one millisecond as the Sun does in an entire day. However, by the time they reach earth they are very weak and difficult to detect.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-long cosmic explosions that each produce the energy equivalent to the sun's annual output. More than 15 years after the deep-space pulses of electromagnetic radio waves were first discovered, their perplexing nature continues to surprise scientists—and newly published research only deepens the mystery surrounding them.