Epic cosmic radio burst finally seen in real time

www.newscientist.com ^ | 08:00 19 January 2015 | by Michael Slezak

[Red Badger]

A gigantic but fleeting burst of radio waves has been caught in the act for the first time, helping to narrow down the vast array of things that might cause them. Figuring out what these fast radio bursts are or where they come from could help answer some of the biggest cosmological questions.

They last about a millisecond but give off as much energy as the sun does in a day, all seemingly in a tight band of radio-frequency waves.

Their source is a mystery, but whatever causes them must be huge, cataclysmic and up to 5.5 billion light years away, says Emily Petroff of Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia.

A top contender is the collapse of an oversized neutron star that should have given way to a black hole long ago, but was spinning so fast that relativity made it seem lighter. But other possibilities include a flare from a magnetar, a type of neutron star with an extremely strong magnetic field.

A total of nine fast radio bursts have been reported since the first was discovered in 2007, but all of them were found weeks or years after the actual event by sifting through old data.

[SNIP]

Corrections, 20 January 2014: When this article was first published, it referred to fast radio bursts as "blitzars", but blitzars are just one possible account of what FRBs might be. And the figure we initially gave for the amount of energy that the blasts give off in a millisecond was significantly overblown. Both things have now been corrected.

[NativeSon]

I think that the magnetar and spinning neutron star or pulsar would have a regular interval of pulsing. Even if there are other bodies blocking/bending the EM wave, those would also yield a pattern.

Ejected mass/energy from a collapsing massive star could be seemingly erratic or perhaps released energy from matter pulled into a black hole?

[tophat9000]

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

[stremba]

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.)

[SgtHooper]

We’re gonna need bigger batteries!

[Bigg Red]

Ah, yes, the testosterone-challenged Wolf Blitzer and his patchy little beard that he wears in hopes of camouflaging his lack of a chin. It does not work, Blitz.

[SgtHooper]

Lets not forget about parallax—the source has had 5.5 billion years to move to a different location.