A new study suggests powerful, mysterious and very quick blasts are constantly going off in other galaxies, Space.com reported.
The explosions are known as fast radio bursts (FRB) and a team of scientists detected four above the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. The blasts only lasted a few thousandths of a second, but their power was unprecedented.
"These bursts gave off more energy in a millisecond than the sun does in 300,000 years," said principal investigator Dan Thornton of the University of Manchester in England.
Using Australia's CSIRO Parkes radio telescope, the team spotted four new signals across the sky ranging from 5.5 to 10 billion light years away. In other words, it took some of the signals ten million years to reach Earth's view. According to the study, these FRBs occur once every ten seconds.
"These are extragalactic in origin - not from the Milky Way - but the source is likely located in another galaxy," Thornton said. "They are so bright and narrow that we can limit the size of the emission region at the source to just a few hundred kilometers."
The team concluded after rigorous testing that the signals had to have come from well past the Milky Way's edge and, despite their distance and brief nature, the scientists could estimate their location accurately. However, the origin is still unknown, as nothing could be observed in optical, gamma or X-ray wavelengths.
"Other variable extragalactic radio sources vary on timescales of days to months," Thornton said. "FRBs happen in just a few milliseconds."
The study said the FRB's could be caused by ultra-dense magnetic fields from two neutron stars. This would create a supernova of sorts as it interacts with the star's magnetic field, creating the burst. The study said that would be a rare occurance.
"Our favorite explanation is a giant burst from a magnetar, a highly magnetized type of neutron star," Thornton said.
