Mysterious bursts of radio pulses prefer a galaxy's loving arms

By looking at what neighborhoods they live in, astronomers are starting to get a better handle on mysterious, extremely short, and powerful flashes of energy called Fast Radio Bursts.

FRBs, for short, are pretty weird. They're intense but extremely short, lasting for a millisecond or so, and so powerful they can be detected at intergalactic distances; many are extremely far away. The first one was detected in 2001 but wasn't noticed until later, when astronomers looked at archived data. They st...