Scientists may finally be close to explaining strange radio signals from beyond the Milky Way

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are intense, short-lived blasts of radio waves hailing from beyond the Milky Way that can emit the same amount of energy in just thousandths of a second that the sun takes three days to emit.

However, despite their power and the fact that around 10,000 FRBs could erupt in the sky over Earth every day, these blasts of radiowaves remain Mysterious. One of the biggest puzzles surrounding FRBs is why most flash once and then disappear while a tiny minority (less than 3 percent) repeat the flash. This has led scientists on a quest to discover the mechanisms that launch FRBs. Some even believe different celestial objects can produce both repeating and non-repeating FRBs.

Scientists from the University of Toronto used the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) to focus on properties of polarized light associated with 128 non-repeating FRBs. This revealed the one-off FRBs seem to originate in faraway galaxies that are much like our own Milky Way, as opposed to the extreme environments that launch their repeating cousins. The results could bring scientists closer to cracking the lingering celestial puzzle of FRBs at last.

Related: Hubble tracks farthest and most powerful fast radio burst back to 'blob' of 7 galaxies

"So far, when we've thought about FRBs, we've only looked at them in the same way that we would look at a star in the sky, thinking about how bright it is, maybe figuring out how away far it is, things like that," research lead author Ayush Pandhi, a Ph.D. student at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics and the David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, told Space.com. "However, FRBs are special because they also emit polarized light, meaning the light coming from these sources is all oriented in one direction."

The key difference about this research is it really drilled down on the investigation of polarized light.

Polarized light is made up of waves that are orientated in the same way — vertically, horizontally, or at an angle between those two directions. Changes in polarization could explain the mechanism that launched the FRB and thus reveal what its source was. Polarization can also reveal details about what environments the FRB needed to traverse before reaching our detectors on Earth. This study represented the first large-scale look at the non-repeating 97% of FRBs in polarized light.