A fast radio burst, or FRB, is one of the most violent and baffling events known to astronomers.

Key points: A fast radio burst (FRB) is a fierce spike of energy that comes from beyond our galaxy and lasts only milliseconds

A fast radio burst (FRB) is a fierce spike of energy that comes from beyond our galaxy and lasts only milliseconds Only 34 FRBs have been spotted before

Only 34 FRBs have been spotted before The new haul was collected by the ASKAP telescope, which uses multiple antennas to search a much wider area than other telescopes

Only 34 have been spotted before, but a powerful new telescope in the West Australian outback has detected another 20 in just one year.

The haul, reported today in the journal Nature, includes the brightest and closest of these mysterious flashes that have ever been seen.

"A single pulse can contain anywhere from two months to 80 years' worth of energy from the sun," said study lead author Ryan Shannon, of Swinburne University.

But, he said, we still don't know what produces these fleeting high-energy cosmic signals.

"There's nothing else we know of in the universe with emissions like this."

The latest batch of extragalactic signals has come from halfway across the universe, said astronomer and co-author Keith Bannister of the CSIRO.

"That means for us to detect them, they have to be stupidly bright," Dr Bannister said.

What's more, he added, the discovery of more such signals could help astronomers unravel another major mystery

"We don't know where a lot of the matter in the universe is," said Dr Bannister.

"We really hope we can use fast radio bursts to find that missing gas.

"By the process of passing through the gas, they tell us that it's there — where it is and where it isn't."

The power of many dishes

Even though scientists think FRBs happen all the time, you have to be very lucky to catch one.

"A fast radio burst is a millisecond-duration event, so if you click your fingers you've missed it," Dr Bannister said.

The first FRB, known as the Lorimer Burst, was detected in 2007 by astronomers trawling through old data from the Parkes Telescope.

Since then another 33 bursts have been discovered, each named according to its discovery date.

One of these observations — FRB121102, revealed by the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico — is especially intriguing, because it appears to repeat: multiple flashes have been detected from the same spot in the sky.

"We don't know whether all FRBs are like that one, or there are different types of FRBs," Dr Bannister said.

ASKAP's dishes can be all pointed in one direction, or in different directions to scan a greater area of sky. ( ABC: Jonathan Webb )

The extraordinary new haul of bursts was detected by CSIRO's Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope, located 300 kilometres north-east of Geraldton at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory.

Unlike the Parkes or Arecibo telescopes, ASKAP peers at the sky using multiple 12-metre radio antennas, spread across a 6 km area.

The antennas can either all point in one direction, or at different parts of the sky in a special "fly-eye" mode, which enables astronomers to look at much more of the sky at once.

"We thought we'd have better luck fishing with the fly-eye configurations," said Dr Bannister, who helped develop the telescope.

"We search with all those antennas independently, because we hope one of them will be pointing in the lucky direction when [a burst] happens."

ASKAP will eventually have 36 antennas up and running, but the new discoveries were made using only eight.

With just those eight dishes, the astronomers canvassed an area of sky 1,000 times the size of the full moon.

What did the telescope pick up?

Dr Shannon spent many hours watching and waiting for bursts.

"We were detecting them about every 14 days," he said.

"[But] it's not like they come every second Wednesday, they're coming at random times.

"So sometimes there's a couple in a week, and sometimes you have to wait four weeks."

The first signal was found in January last year, just four days into the telescope's operation.

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By studying tell-tale lags between the arrival of different radio wavelengths, astronomers can calculate how much gas the signal has travelled through — and thus, the approximate distance of the source.

The closest FRB among the new findings came from about 100 million light years away, and the brightest signal was 10 times greater than the brightest signal previously detected by the Parkes telescope.

The team of astronomers also found that none of these new bursts repeated like the one picked up by the Arecibo telescope.

"We looked at these regions before the fast radio bursts were detected, we saw them when they were detected and we saw them for a month after that," Dr Shannon said.

"We stared at some of these regions for 30 days — and nothing. That really challenges this question of are we looking at the same thing."

The ASKAP telescope with dishes pointing in multiple directions. ( ABC: Jonathan Webb )

Just the start of what we're going to find

The new discoveries were "just the start of what we'll see using ASKAP," said Tara Murphy, a radio astronomer from Sydney University, who was not involved in the current research.

"There's been a long campaign from multiple telescopes to try and find [FRBs], but they've been very elusive."

"Then they switched ASKAP on and these detections just started flooding in straight away," said Dr Murphy, who uses the same telescope to search for other extreme events such as merging neutron stars.

More bursts may well be discovered as all the antennae come online and work ramps up at ASKAP.

Like many of the previous discoveries, FRBs can be detected in the background of other projects, such those done by Dr Murphy's team.

"When I'm using ASKAP, [other researchers] can actually funnel that same data away and search for FRBs without any extra telescope observing."

"So you're using this world class telescope for two projects at the same time."

Dr Murphy said ASKAP will not only allow us to detect FRBs, but it will also help us work out exactly where they come from.

"One of the reasons why FRBs have been a mystery is that we don't know where they are," she explained.

But using the telescope in its conventional mode, where the antennas point in the same direction, will enable astronomers to pinpoint the exact location of the FRB.

"Hence we can find out what their environment is, and what is likely to have caused them."