Radio burst from space mystifies astronomers
UNITED STATES: Astronomers who stumbled upon a powerful burst of
radio waves said on Thursday they had never seen anything like it
before, and it could offer a new way to search for colliding stars or
dying black holes.
They were searching for pulsars — a type of rotating compacted
neutron star that sends out rhythmic pulses of radiation — when they
spotted the giant radio signal.
It was extremely brief but very strong, and appears to have come from
about 3 billion light-years away — a light-year being the distance light
travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km).
“This burst appears to have originated from the distant universe and
may have been produced by an exotic event such as the collision of two
neutron stars or the death throes of an evaporating black hole,” said
Duncan Lorimer of West Virginia University and the National Radio
Astronomy Observatory.
Writing in the journal Science, Lorimer and colleagues said they were
looking at old scans done by the Parkes radio telescope in Australia
when they spotted the burst.
The burst appears to have lasted 5 milliseconds and may be the radio
fingerprint of a single event such as a supernova or the collision of
black holes, the astronomers said. “This burst represents an entirely
new astronomical phenomenon,” Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University in
Australia said in a statement.
Maura McLaughlin of West Virginia University said the event is
probably not rare.
“We think there are probably many of these bursts every day that we
are just not detecting because we don’t have the right kind of surveys
of the sky looking for them,” McLaughlin said in a telephone interview.
“We are really not sure (what it is),” McLaughlin said.
“We think it has got to be some sort of catastrophic event happening
in another galaxy — like two stars colliding and merging or maybe a
black hole. Something kind of exotic,” she said.
It is, however, unlikely to be the extraterrestrial equivalent of “I
Love Lucy” or other radio or television broadcast.
“It’s much too bright. There is no way any civilization that we could
possibly think of could create a thing so incredibly powerful,” she
said.
Washington, Friday, Reuters
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