views Nov 7, 2026 #CHIME #Astronomy #Space
It's 3 a.m. at a radio telescope in Canada. For one thousandth of a second, a flash hits the screen, from a galaxy 500 million light-years away. Then, about 16 days later, it comes back from the exact same spot. And again. Something out there is keeping time, and nobody knows what.

In this video we go deep into fast radio bursts: the 2007 flash found in old data, the "signals" that turned out to be a microwave oven, the first repeater, CHIME's 16-day clock, the old and dead galaxies they shouldn't come from, and the suspects (magnetars, cosmic lighthouses... and yes, aliens). The twist: in 2020 the answer showed up inside our own galaxy, and these flashes now help astronomers weigh the universe itself.