Two new highly scattered fast radio bursts detected with ASKAP. From Jahs-Schindler et al. 2026

Jahns-Schindler et al. report the detection of two highly scattered Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) during commissioning of the Commensal Realtime ASKAP Fast Transient COherent (CRACO) backend. FRB 240312D originates near a spiral arm of a face-on galaxy at a redshift of only 0.05, corresponding to a luminosity distance of 230 Mpc. Scintillation seen in the burst signal, and ascribed to a screen within the Milky Way, constrains the distance of the scattering screen to ∼10 parsecs (~32.6 light years) from the source. FRB 240312D is therefore the first highly scattered FRB where scattering screens in the host galaxy centre, a background galaxy, or intervening structures can all be excluded, leaving only the circumsource medium. Integral field spectroscopy of the host reveals a Milky Way-like galaxy with a star-formation region at the FRB position. The team find refractive scattering in a pulsar wind nebula as the most likely scattering origin. The rate calculated from the two reported FRBs is consistent with the rate seen at lower widths (roughly 200 FRBs/sky/day). This indicates the presence of a large population of highly scattered FRBs. The figure above shows waterfall plots of the two FRBs. The top panel shows the band integrated time series and the right panel shows the spectrum integrated over the on-burst region. Note the time axis, which for many FRBs is plotted in units of milli-seconds, is plotted in seconds for these highly scatter-broadened FRBs.