This article is not about FRBs:<p><i>Earlier this year, Swinburne University's Emily Petroff was the lead author of a report on the first observation of a fast radio burst (FRB) in real time. Previously, the enormously powerful but poorly understood events known as FRBs had only been detected in the records of large radio telescopes years after they happened.</i><p><i>However, among those records was something else, which astronomers named perytons. The first peryton detected was in 1998, although it was not recognized as such until 2011. Perytons look sufficiently like FRBs that astronomers even speculated that the first FRB, known as 010724, might actually have been a peryton.</i>