Cyprus Astronomy Organisation

Out in the depths of space, there are radio signals that astronomers don't understand. Now a Canadian research team has found a repeating signal, only the second of its kind to be discovered.In a new paper published Wednesday in Nature, researchers reveal that a recently unveiled radio telescope in British Columbia the "Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment" (CHIME) captured 13 more FRBs, but more importantly, it caught a second repeating FRB.

Earth is a pretty wild place to live. Not only does our home planet orbit the sun at the perfect distance to sustain life, it even has its own magnetic force field that keeps us from being deep fried by our star’s radiation.

About 2.6 million years ago, an oddly bright light arrived in the prehistoric sky and lingered there for weeks or months. It was a supernova some 150 light-years away from Earth. A few hundred years later, after the new star had long since faded from the sky, cosmic rays from the event finally reached Earth, slamming into our planet. Now, a group of researchers led by Adrian Melott at the University of Kansas believes this cosmic onslaught is linked to a mass extinction of ocean animals roaming Earth’s waters at the time.

The first stars to form after the Big Bang would have been made entirely of elements made in the Big Bang itself which are the lightest and simplest like hydrogen, helium and lithium. The heavier and more complex elements which astronomers call "metals" were made in subsequent stars thermonuclear furnaces. The first stars seeded the universe with the heavier elements when they exploded as supernovae.