On April 28, 2020, two ground-based radio telescopes detected an
intense pulse of radio waves. It only lasted a mere millisecond but, for astonished astronomers, it was a major discovery, representing the first time a fast radio burst (FRB) had ever been detected so close to
Earth.
Located just 30,000 light-years from our planet, the event was firmly within the
Milky Way, and it was, to all intents and purposes, almost impossible to miss.
The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) and the Survey for Transient Astronomical Radio Emission 2 (STARE2) certainly had no problems picking it up. "CHIME wasn’t even looking in the right direction and we still saw it loud and clear in our peripheral vision," said Kiyoshi Masui, assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "STARE2 also saw it, and it’s only a set of a few radio antennae literally made out of cake pans."
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