Caught in real time????
The article says the source could be up to 5.5 billion light years away
That means it happened up to 5.5 billion years ago.
real time in this case would mean a person was looking at the sensor as it recorded the burst as a pass by the earth vs a person looking at what the sensor recorded after the fact
Either way I don’t think it gives you any particular advantage to have seen the data as it was captured vs looking at the recording of what was captured unless they could have made some real time adjustments to the sensors while it was being captured
That might not be true. Looking at it real time allows them to know exactly at what point in time the radio burst became observable. That could become important. I am not a physicist, just an interested layperson, so take this with a bit of a grain of salt. However, it is possible that a burst of neutrinos could be detected coming from the same location. If so, those neutrinos would be delayed (since neutrinos have a tiny mass, and any massive particle must travel at less than the speed of light). The nature and timing of such a neutrino burst might well have some bearing on figuring out the nature of the radio burst. Without a fairly precise timing, though, as to when the radio burst was observable, it would make the timing of a hypothetical subsequent neutrino burst less useful. (I am not saying that there WILL be a neutrino burst detected, but rather it could be, and if it is, the delay might be important information.)
Lets not forget about parallax—the source has had 5.5 billion years to move to a different location.