Inside the quest to map the universe with mysterious bursts of radio energy

When our universe was less than half as old as it is today, a burst of energy that could cook a sun’s worth of popcorn shot out from somewhere amid a compact group of galaxies. Some 8 billion years later, radio waves from that burst reached Earth and were captured by a sophisticated low-frequency radio telescope in the Australian outback. 

The signal, which arrived on June 10, 2022, and lasted for under half a millisecond, is one of a growing class of mysterious radio signals called fast radio bursts.