A recent study featured in Nature Astronomy explores the emergence of "ultra-fast radio bursts," a novel category of fast radio bursts (FRBs) lasting a mere ten millionths of a second or less, a stark contrast to the traditional FRBs that typically endure for only thousandths of a second. This revelation builds upon a 2021 study speculating that FRBs could have such ultra-brief durations. Additionally, it follows the recent announcement by astronomers of the discovery of the oldest and farthest FRB ever observed, situated roughly 8 billion light-years away from Earth.

Mark Snelders, a Ph.D. candidate at ASTRON and the University of Amsterdam, who authored the recent study and co-authored the 2021 study, stated, "During our group meetings, we often talked about it, and by coincidence, I found out that there was a public dataset that we could use for this."

In this study, the research team managed to acquire five hours of data concerning a known FRB called FRB 20121102A, first detected in November 2012, located approximately three billion light-years away from Earth. It is noteworthy for being the first recognized repeating FRB, according to a 2022 study. The data was sourced from the Breakthrough Listen project, a global scientific collaboration aimed at discovering signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, with data originating from the Breakthrough Listen at Green Bank division of the Open Data Archive.

Upon obtaining the data, the researchers divided the initial 30 minutes into 500,000 separate images per second, employing machine learning and software filters to pinpoint outliers within the data, ultimately identifying eight ultra-fast radio bursts, each lasting a mere ten millionths of a second or less. To put this duration in context, ten millionths of a second equates to 0.0000001 seconds.

The researchers emphasize, "In detecting and characterizing these microsecond-duration bursts, we show that there exists a population of ultra-fast radio bursts that current wide-field FRB searches are missing due to insufficient time resolution. These results indicate that FRBs occur more frequently and with greater diversity than initially thought, potentially impacting our understanding of energy, wait times, and burst rate distributions."

While the enigma of how these ultra-fast radio bursts originate remains, the team anticipates discovering more such occurrences in the future. However, a significant challenge lies in identifying data files that can be subdivided into 500,000 separate images per second, as not all files possess the necessary specifications to enable this division.
The long-term objective for the team is to employ FRB data for mapping the space between stars and galaxies, aiming to gain deeper insights into the interactions between galaxies and the surrounding gas environment.

FRBs have long intrigued astronomers, having been first identified in 2007. Substantial progress has been made in understanding their potential origins and the prevalence of FRBs in the universe. Notably, it has been determined that most FRBs originate beyond our Milky Way Galaxy.

In 2020, it was revealed that one source of FRBs came from a magnetar within our Milky Way Galaxy. Furthermore, while FRB 20121102A is recognized as the initial repeating FRB, a 2023 study identified 25 regularly repeating FRBs via the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) in British Columbia, Canada, which has identified over 1,000 FRBs to date.