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Fast Radio Burst Trivia Questions

How much do you really know about Fast Radio Burst? Below are 8 true or false statements. Click each one to reveal the answer and explanation.

1.

All fast radio bursts are extragalactic, meaning they come from outside the Milky Way galaxy.

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Easy
✗ FALSE

This is false because FRB 200428 was detected from within the Milky Way, proving that at least some bursts originate in our own galaxy.

2.

Some fast radio bursts repeat, while most are one-off events that never flash again.

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Easy
✓ TRUE

Repeating FRBs like FRB 121102 have been observed multiple times, but the vast majority are single bursts, suggesting different origins.

3.

The first fast radio burst was discovered in 2007 by astronomers analyzing archival data from the Parkes Observatory.

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Easy
✓ TRUE

Duncan Lorimer and his student David Narkevic found the burst in 2007 while examining 2001 data, earning it the nickname 'Lorimer Burst.'

4.

Fast radio bursts are all caused by alien technology, as some scientists have seriously proposed.

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Medium
✗ FALSE

While one 2017 paper discussed an extraterrestrial origin as a remote possibility, no credible evidence supports it; most FRBs are linked to magnetars or neutron stars.

5.

Fast radio bursts release more energy in a millisecond than the Sun does in an entire year.

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Medium
✗ FALSE

Actually, FRBs release about as much energy as the Sun produces in a few days to a month—not a full year, though still immense.

6.

The closest known fast radio burst originated from a magnetar inside the Milky Way, only about 30,000 light-years away.

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Medium
✓ TRUE

In April 2020, FRB 200428 was traced to a magnetar named SGR 1935+2154 in our galaxy, the first Milky Way FRB source identified.

7.

Scientists have used fast radio bursts to measure the missing matter in the universe between galaxies.

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Hard
✓ TRUE

By analyzing how FRB signals are dispersed by intergalactic electrons, astronomers can calculate the density of 'missing' baryonic matter.

8.

Fast radio bursts have only been detected by radio telescopes on Earth, never by space-based instruments.

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Hard
✗ FALSE

In 2020, the Canadian CHIME telescope detected an FRB from a magnetar in our galaxy, and space-based X-ray telescopes like Fermi also caught it.

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