Radio bursts from space are exhibiting a strange ‘sad trombone’ effect

Short, powerful bursts of radio waves from space are getting stranger and stranger. Astronomers have spotted 35 of these bursts from a single object with a pattern unlike any we have seen before.

Sofia Sheikh at the SETI Institute in California and her colleagues observed this object, a fast radio burst (FRB) called FRB 20220912A, over the course of 541 hours of observation with the Allen Telescope Array in California.