Scientists have found eight more mysterious repeating radio bursts emanating from deep space, which more than quadruples the known number of signals from earlier this year. The new signals were found by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) radio telescope, and give scientists a much broader data set that they hope may help finally unlock their origin. With the discovery, described in a paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the number of repeating radio bursts signals has climbed to 11. The new signals will aid scientists in their efforts to trace the origin and cause of mysterious radio bursts from deep space. According to Nature, the results of a separate observation from researchers in Australia have yet to be published, but bring the number of findings this month alone to nine total.

Researchers at Breakthrough Listen, a SETI project led by the University of California, Berkeley, have now used machine learning to discover 72 new fast radio bursts from a mysterious source some 3 billion light years from Earth. Fast radio bursts are bright pulses of radio emission mere milliseconds in duration, thought to originate from distant galaxies. The source of these emissions is still unclear, however. Theories range from highly magnetized neutron stars blasted by gas streams from a nearby supermassive black hole, to suggestions that the burst properties are consistent with signatures of technology developed by an advanced civilization. "This work is exciting not just because it helps us understand the dynamic behavior of fast radio bursts in more detail, but also because of the promise it shows for using machine learning to detect signals missed by classical algorithms," said Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen, the initiative to find signs of intelligent life in the universe.

This animation shows 93 detected signals from FRB121102. Among them 21 have previously been reported (denoted by red numbers), and 72 are new (white numbers). Each signal is shown as a spectrogram - the colors indicate the intensity of the signal as a function of frequency from 4.5 to 8.0 GHz (vertical axis) and time (horizontal axis, showing 100 milliseconds around the time of detection of each burst). Researchers at Breakthrough Listen - the program searching for signs of intelligent life in the Universe - detected 72 new radio bursts from distant galaxies using AI. In 2017, the Listen team at UC Berkeley's search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) research center, had detected 21 fast radio bursts (FRB) by analyzing over 400 terabytes of data.