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Comment by foobaw | Hacker News Reader

Will we ever find out what this actually means in our lifetime?

Aren’t these just quasars? Not necessarily anything that special. Are people thinking this is extra terrestrial communication of some sort?

Correct, and it is pretty special to learn that (while still rare), they're far more common than we initially thought

I agree. As a child I thought these would be extremely rare. In my naive little kid brain I guess I figured there must be only a handful of them known to exist, and I had endless ideas about how such a rare and unique celestial entity must have alien origins. Haha.

The article says otherwise.

Nope, fast-radio-bursts (FRB's) aren't commonly attributed to quasars.

From ["Not all fast radio bursts are created equal"](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03894-6), 2020-01-06:

> Curiously, because the luminosity of a typical quasar is not dissimilar to the peak luminosity of an FRB, we cannot yet completely discount the involvement of supermassive black holes. But Marcote and colleagues’ results argue against that possibility, and the timescales for quasar variability are more likely to be days to months than milliseconds.

Wikipedia has a [section on hypotheses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_radio_burst#Origin_hypoth...).

I favor "asteroid falling on the neuron stars" theory. Both are common and it would also explain periodical ones.

I just imagined how a neuron star would look like. Creepy.

That must be a heck of a big asteroid.

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