To look for new evidence on what causes fast radio bursts I co-led a targeted search using fast radio bursts detected by a radio telescope called CHIME in Canada.project has detected hundreds of fast radio bursts, there's a good chance of catching one close enough to Earth to be observed by a gravitational wave telescope. This is important as fast radio bursts are so bright they can be seen from billions of light years away—much farther than present gravitational wave observatories can see.
We then estimated the distance to each fast radio burst, and searched for gravitational wave data around the 40 closest events . We looked for gravitational wave signals around the sky position of each non-repeating fast radio burst around the time each occurred. For these non-repeaters, we did two kinds of search: one that looked for known gravitational wave signals, like those from colliding black holes or neutrons, and another that essentially looked for any burst of energy that was out of the ordinary.
However, the closest fast radio burst in our sample was almost close enough for us to rule out the possibility it was caused by a collision between a neutron star and a black hole. Uncertainty in the distance to the burst means we can't rule it out conclusively, but we are encourage by the fact the sensitive range of gravitational wave detectors is closing in on the distance to fast radio bursts.